A Hybrid Intelligent Computational Scheme for Determination of Refractive Index of Crude Oil Using SARA Fraction Analysis

Abstract

Asphaltene precipitation and consequent deposition may result in several operational problems ranging from the wellbore to transmission lines. Despite several studies, stability conditions of the asphaltene in crude oil are still a challenging issue and a potential area of investigation. Refractive Index (RI) is a parameter indicative of the region at which asphaltene becomes stable. In this study, a Committee Machine Intelligent System (CMIS) is incorporated to predict the RI of different crude oils through the existing SARA fractions experimental data. The CMIS itself utilizes different artificial neural networks: Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Radial Basis Function (RBF), and Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LSSVM). By comparing the results of each artificial neural network with the final output, it was demonstrated that the CMIS increases the generalization capability of the utilized artificial network. The results were compared with two well‐known classical correlations. It was proven that the proposed intelligent system outperforms the classical correlations. At the end, outlier detection was performed to identify data which deviate from the bulk of the data points and obtain the applicability domain of the CMIS model.