Modeling of steam distillation mechanism during steam injection process using artificial intelligence.

ABSTRACT

Steam distillation as one of the important mechanisms has a great role in oil recovery in thermal methods and so it is important to simulate this process experimentally and theoretically. In this work, the simulation of steam distillation is performed on sixteen sets of crude oil data found in the literature. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as artificial neural network (ANN) and also adaptive neurofuzzy interference system (ANFIS) are used in this study as effective methods to simulate the distillate recoveries of these sets of data. Thirteen sets of data were used to train the models and three sets were used to test the models. The developed models are highly compatible with respect to input oil properties and can predict the distillate yield with minimum entry. For showing the performance of the proposed models, simulation of steam distillation is also done using modified Peng-Robinson equation of state. Comparison between the calculated distillates by ANFIS and neural network models and also equation of state-based method indicates that the errors of the ANFIS model for training data and test data sets are lower than those of other methods.