THE ESTIMATION OF KINEMATIC VISCOSITY OF PETROLEUM CRUDE OILS AND FRACTIONS WITH A NEURAL-NET

Citation
Tj. Vanderwalt et al., THE ESTIMATION OF KINEMATIC VISCOSITY OF PETROLEUM CRUDE OILS AND FRACTIONS WITH A NEURAL-NET, Chemical engineering journal and the biochemical engineering journal, 51(3), 1993, pp. 151-158
Citations number
11
Categorie Soggetti
Engineering, Chemical
ISSN journal
09230467
Volume
51
Issue
3
Year of publication
1993
Pages
151 - 158
Database
ISI
SICI code
0923-0467(1993)51:3<151:TEOKVO>2.0.ZU;2-U
Abstract
This paper illustrates how a neural net, a three-layered Perceptron, c an be trained to estimate viscosities for undefined crude oils and fra ctions. Three Saudi-Arabian crude oils were employed to illustrate the use of the neural net to approximate the relation in a very simple ma nner with no need for a priori knowledge of the system. This empirical correlation was accurate to 98.74% if tested on experimental data not used during training, which is a fivefold improvement on average resu lts obtained by two recently-proposed equations to estimate the viscos ity of hydrocarbons. Although the neural net equation seems to be less transparent than former correlations, a method called backward analys is is proposed to analyze the weight matrix of the neural net in order to gain valuable insight into the viscosity system.