Predicting asphaltene precipitation during titration of diluted crude oil with paraffin using artificial neural network (ANN).

Asphaltene precipitation from crude oil in underground reservoirs and on ground facilities is one of the major problems in a large portion of oil production units around the world. Many scaling equations and intelligent predictive models using the artificial neural network (ANN) are proposed in the literature but none of them can be applied when crude oil is diluted with any types of paraffin. In this study, feed forward artificial neural network is used for prediction of the amount of asphaltene precipitated weight percent of diluted crude oil with paraffin based on titration tests data from published literature. Trial and error method is utilized to optimize the artificial neural network topology in order to enhance its strength of generalization. The results showed that there is good agreement between experimental and predicted values. This predictive model can be applied to estimate the amount of asphaltene precipitated weight percent when the crude oil is diluted with paraffin and to avoid experimental measurement that is time-consuming and requires expensive experimental apparatus as well as complicated interpretation procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]