Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for Prediction of Viscosity Reduction of Heavy Crude Oil using Different Organic Solvents

Abstract

The increase globally fossil fuel consumption as it represents the main source of energy around the world, and the sources of heavy oil more than light, different techniques were used to reduce the viscosity and increase mobility of heavy crude oil. this study focusing on the experimental tests  and modeling with Back Feed Forward Artificial Neural Network (BFF-ANN) of the dilution technique to reduce a  heavy oil viscosity that was collected from the south- Iraq oil fields using organic solvents, organic diluents with different weight percentage  (5, 10 and  20 wt.% )  of  (n-heptane, toluene, and a mixture of  different ratio toluene / n-Heptane)  at constant temperature. Experimentally the higher viscosity reduction was about from 135.6 to 26.33 cP when the mixture of toluene/heptane (75/25 vol. %) was added. The input parameters for the model were solvent type, wt. % of solvent, RPM and shear rate, the results have been demonstrated that the proposed model has superior performance, where the obtained value of R was greater than 0.99 which confirms a good agreement between the correlation and experimental data, the predicate for reduced viscosity and DVR was with accuracy 98.7%, on the other hand, the μ and DVR% factors were closer to unity for the ANN model.