Viscosity prediction of hydrocarbon binary mixture using an artificial neural network-group contribution method

Abstract

Abstract In this study, the viscosity of hydrocarbon binary mixtures has been predicted with an artificial neural network and a group contribution method (ANN-GCM) by utilizing various training algorithm including Scaled Conjugate Gradient (SCG), Levenberg-Marquardt (LM), Resilient back Propagation (RP), and Gradient Descent with variable learning rate back propagation (GDX). Moreover, different transfer functions such as Tan-sigmoid (tansig), Log-sigmoid (logsig), and purelin were investigated in hidden and output layer and their effects on network precision were estimated. Accordingly, 796 experimental data points of viscosity of hydrocarbon binary mixture were collected from the literature for a wide range of operating parameters. The temperature, pressure, mole fraction, molecular weight, and structural group of the system were selected as the independent input parameters. The statistical analysis results with R 2 = 0.99 revealed a small value for Average absolute relative deviation (AARD) of 1.288 and Mean square error (MSE) of 0.001018 by comparing the ANN predicted data with experimental data. Neural network configuration was also optimized. Based on the results, the network with one hidden layer and 27 neurons with the Levenberg-Marquardt training algorithm and tansig transfer function for hidden layer along with purelin transfer function for output layer constituted the best network structure. Further, the weights and bias were optimized to minimize the error. Then, the obtained results of the present study were compared with the data from some previous methods. The results suggested that this work can predict the viscosity of hydrocarbon binary mixture with better AARD. In general, the results indicated that combining ANN and GCM model is capable to predict the viscosity of hydrocarbon binary mixtures with a good accuracy.