Development of an Artificial Neural Network Algorithm for the Prediction of Asphaltene Precipitation

Abstract

The precipitation and deposition of crude oil polar fractions such as asphaltenes in petroleum reservoirs considerably reduce rock permeability and oil recovery. Therefore, it is of great importance to determine how and how much the asphaltenes precipitate as a function of pressure, temperature, and liquid phase composition. The authors designed and applied an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model to predict the amount of asphaltene precipitation at a given operating condition. Among this training, the back-propagation learning algorithm with different training methods was used. The most suitable algorithm with an appropriate number of neurons in the hidden layer, which provides the minimum error, was found to be the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm. An extensive experimental data for the amount of asphaltene precipitation at various temperatures (293–343 K) was used to create the input and target data for generating the ANN model. The predicted results of asphaltene precipitation from the ANN model was also compared with the results of proposed scaling equations in the literature. The results revealed that scaling equations cannot predict the amount of asphaltene precipitation adequately. With an acceptable quantitative and qualitative agreement between experimental data and predicted amount of asphaltene precipitation for all ranges of dilution ratio, solvent molecular weight and temperature was obtained through using ANN model.