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Over time, with the increase in population and the subsequent increase in energy consumption and also due to the non-renewability of fossil fuels, the study of alternative fuels has increased. One of these fuels is biodiesel, which is a suitable alternative to fossil fuels such as diesel and received much attention from researchers today. For this reason, measuring the physical properties of biodiesel is of great importance. Due to the high cost and time-consuming nature of laboratory methods, numerical methods are used to estimate material properties. The novelty of this research was the use of two white box models, including Group method of data handling (GMDH) and Gene expression programming (GEP), which work on the basis of artificial intelligence. By using these models, two simple mathematical equations with high accuracy were presented to predict the surface tension of biodiesel. These models can be used at different temperatures and molecular weights. To do modeling, 78 laboratory data available in the literature were gathered and the data were randomly divided into two groups, train and test, in a ratio of 80 and 20. The input parameters include mass fraction of fatty acid ethyl esters and temperature (T), and esters are divided into three groups according to their molecular weight: less than 200 (Mw1), between 200 and 300 (Mw2), and greater than 300 (Mw3). The statistical error parameters were calculated for the two models developed in this research and after comparing the results, it was found that the GMDH model estimates the surface tension of biodiesel with a higher accuracy. The average absolute relative error for GMDH and GEP models was reported as 0.97 and 1.89, respectively. Also, other statistical error parameters of GMDH such as RMSE, SD, and R2 for the GMDH model were obtained as 0.444, 0.000233, and 0.9233, respectively. Moreover, sensitivity analysis showed that temperature has the highest impact on the surface tension of biodiesel, which is also an inverse effect. Finally, suspicious laboratory and outlier data points were identified using the Leverage technique. According to this analysis, only five data points were identified as outliers and suspicious laboratory data.
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The growing application of carbon dioxide (CO2) in various environmental and energy fields, including carbon capture and storage (CCS) and several CO2-based enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques, highlights the importance of studying the phase equilibria of this gas with water. Therefore, accurate prediction of CO2 solubility in water becomes an important thermodynamic property. This study focused on developing two powerful intelligent models, namely gradient boosting (GBoost) and light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM) that predict CO2 solubility in water with high accuracy. The results revealed the outperformance of the GBoost model with root mean square error (RMSE) and determination coefficient (R2) of 0.137 mol/kg and 0.9976, respectively. The trend analysis demonstrated that the developed models were highly capable of detecting the physical trend of CO2 solubility in water across various pressure and temperature ranges. Moreover, the Leverage technique was employed to identify suspected data points as well as the applicability domain of the proposed models. The results showed that less than 5% of the data points were detected as outliers representing the large applicability domain of intelligent models. The outcome of this research provided insight into the potential of intelligent models in predicting solubility of CO2 in pure water.
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Ionic liquids (ILs) are more widely used within the industry than ever before, and accurate models of their physicochemical characteristics are becoming increasingly important during the process optimization. It is especially challenging to simulate the viscosity of ILs since there is no widely agreed explanation of how viscosity is determined in liquids. In this research, genetic programming (GP) and group method of data handling (GMDH) models were used as white-box machine learning approaches to predict the viscosity of pure ILs. These methods were developed based on a large open literature database of 2813 experimental viscosity values from 45 various ILs at different pressures (0.06-298.9 MPa) and temperatures (253.15-573 K). The models were developed based on five, six, and seven inputs, and it was found that all the models with seven inputs provided more accurate results, while the models with five and six inputs had acceptable accuracy and simpler formulas. Based on GMDH and GP proposed approaches, the suggested GMDH model with seven inputs gave the most exact results with an average absolute relative deviation (AARD) of 8.14% and a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.98. The proposed techniques were compared with theoretical and empirical models available in the literature, and it was displayed that the GMDH model with seven inputs strongly outperforms the existing approaches. The leverage statistical analysis revealed that most of the experimental data were located within the applicability domains of both GMDH and GP models and were of high quality. Trend analysis also illustrated that the GMDH and GP models could follow the expected trends of viscosity with variations in pressure and temperature. In addition, the relevancy factor portrayed that the temperature had the greatest impact on the ILs viscosity. The findings of this study illustrated that the proposed models represented strong alternatives to time-consuming and costly experimental methods of ILs viscosity measurement.
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Precise measurement and prediction of the fluid flow rates in production wells are crucial for anticipating the production volume and hydrocarbon recovery and creating a steady and controllable flow regime in such wells. This study suggests two approaches to predict the flow rate through wellhead chokes. The first is a data-driven approach using different methods, namely: Adaptive boosting support vector regression (Adaboost-SVR), multivariate adaptive regression spline (MARS), radial basis function (RBF), and multilayer perceptron (MLP) with three algorithms: Levenberg-Marquardt (LM), bayesian-regularization (BR), and scaled conjugate gradient (SCG). The second is a developed correlation that depends on wellhead pressure (Pwh), gas-to-liquid ratio (GLR), and choke size (Dc). A dataset of 565 data points is available for model development. The performance of the two suggested approaches is compared with earlier correlations. Results revealed that the proposed models outperform the existing ones, with the Adaboost-SVR model showing the best performance with an average absolute percent relative error (AAPRE) of 5.15% and a correlation coefficient of 0.9784. Additionally, the results indicated that the developed correlation resulted in better predictions compared to the earlier ones. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis of the input variable was also investigated in this study and revealed that the choke size variable had the most significant effect, while the Pwh and GLR showed a slight effect on the liquid rate. Eventually, the leverage approach showed that only 2.1% of the data points were in the suspicious range.
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As an emerging desalination technology, forward osmosis (FO) can potentially become a reliable method to help remedy the current water crisis. Introducing uncomplicated and precise models could help FO systems' optimization. This paper presents the prediction and evaluation of FO systems' membrane flux using various artificial intelligence-based models. Detailed data gathering and cleaning were emphasized because appropriate modeling requires precise inputs. Accumulating data from the original sources, followed by duplicate removal, outlier detection, and feature selection, paved the way to begin modeling. Six models were executed for the prediction task, among which two are tree-based models, two are deep learning models, and two are miscellaneous models. The calculated coefficient of determination (R2 ) of our best model (XGBoost) was 0.992. In conclusion, tree-based models (XGBoost and CatBoost) show more accurate performance than neural networks. Furthermore, in the sensitivity analysis, feed solution (FS) and draw solution (DS) concentrations showed a strong correlation with membrane flux. PRACTITIONER POINTS: The FO membrane flux was predicted using a variety of machine-learning models. Thorough data preprocessing was executed. The XGBoost model showed the best performance, with an R2 of 0.992. Tree-based models outperformed neural networks and other models.
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Inteligência Artificial , Purificação da Água , Purificação da Água/métodos , Membranas Artificiais , Osmose , ÁguaRESUMO
Accurate prediction of fuel deposition during crude oil pyrolysis is pivotal for sustaining the combustion front and ensuring the effectiveness of in-situ combustion enhanced oil recovery (ISC EOR). Employing 2071 experimental TGA datasets from 13 diverse crude oil samples extracted from the literature, this study sought to precisely model crude oil pyrolysis. A suite of robust machine learning techniques, encompassing three black-box approaches (Categorical Gradient Boosting-CatBoost, Gaussian Process Regression-GPR, Extreme Gradient Boosting-XGBoost), and a white-box approach (Genetic Programming-GP), was employed to estimate crude oil residue at varying temperature intervals during TGA runs. Notably, the XGBoost model emerged as the most accurate, boasting a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 0.7796% and a determination coefficient (R2) of 0.9999. Subsequently, the GPR, CatBoost, and GP models demonstrated commendable performance. The GP model, while displaying slightly higher error in comparison to the black-box models, yielded acceptable results and proved suitable for swift estimation of crude oil residue during pyrolysis. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis was conducted to reveal the varying influence of input parameters on residual crude oil during pyrolysis. Among the inputs, temperature and asphaltenes were identified as the most influential factors in the crude oil pyrolysis process. Higher temperatures and oil °API gravity were associated with a negative impact, leading to a decrease in fuel deposition. On the other hand, increased values of asphaltenes, resins, and heating rates showed a positive impact, resulting in an increase in fuel deposition. These findings underscore the importance of precise modeling for fuel deposition during crude oil pyrolysis, offering insights that can significantly benefit ISC EOR practices.
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When nanoparticles are dispersed and stabilized in a base-fluid, the resulting nanofluid undergoes considerable changes in its thermophysical properties, which can have a substantial influence on the performance of nanofluid-flow systems. With such necessity and importance, developing a set of mathematical correlations to identify these properties in various conditions can greatly eliminate costly and time-consuming experimental tests. Hence, the current study aims to develop innovative correlations for estimating the specific heat capacity of mono-nanofluids. The accurate estimation of this crucial property can result in the development of more efficient and effective thermal systems, such as heat exchangers, solar collectors, microchannel cooling systems, etc. In this regard, four powerful soft-computing techniques were considered, including Generalized Reduced Gradient (GRG), Genetic Programming (GP), Gene Expression Programming (GEP), and Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH). These techniques were implemented on 2084 experimental data-points, corresponding to ten different kinds of nanoparticles and six different kinds of base-fluids, collected from previous research sources. Eventually, four distinct correlations with high accuracy were provided, and their outputs were compared to three correlations that had previously been published by other researchers. These novel correlations are applicable to various oxide-based mono-nanofluids for a broad range of independent variable values. The superiority of newly developed correlations was proven through various statistical and graphical error analyses. The GMDH-based correlation revealed the best performance with an Average Absolute Percent Relative Error (AAPRE) of 2.4163% and a Coefficient of Determination (R2) of 0.9743. At last, a leverage statistical approach was employed to identify the GMDH technique's application domain and outlier data, and also, a sensitivity analysis was carried out to clarify the degree of dependence between input and output variables.
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In powder metallurgy materials, sintered density in Cu-Al alloy plays a critical role in detecting mechanical properties. Experimental measurement of this property is costly and time-consuming. In this study, adaptive boosting decision tree, support vector regression, k-nearest neighbors, extreme gradient boosting, and four multilayer perceptron (MLP) models tuned by resilient backpropagation, Levenberg-Marquardt (LM), scaled conjugate gradient, and Bayesian regularization were employed for predicting powder densification through sintering. Yield strength, Young's modulus, volume variation caused by the phase transformation, hardness, liquid volume, liquidus temperature, the solubility ratio among the liquid phase and the solid phase, sintered temperature, solidus temperature, sintered atmosphere, holding time, compaction pressure, particle size, and specific shape factor were regarded as the input parameters of the suggested models. The cross plot, error distribution curve, and cumulative frequency diagram as graphical tools and average percent relative error (APRE), average absolute percent relative error (AAPRE), root mean square error (RMSE), standard deviation (SD), and coefficient of correlation (R) as the statistical evaluations were utilized to estimate the models' accuracy. All of the developed models were compared with preexisting approaches, and the results exhibited that the developed models in the present work are more precise and valid than the existing ones. The designed MLP-LM model was found to be the most precise approach with AAPRE = 1.292%, APRE = -0.032%, SD = 0.020, RMSE = 0.016, and R = 0.989. Lately, outlier detection was applied performing the leverage technique to detect the suspected data points. The outlier detection discovered that few points are located out of the applicability domain of the proposed MLP-LM model.
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Evaluation, prediction, and measurement of carbon dioxide (CO2) solubility in different polymers are crucial for engineers in various chemical applications, such as extraction and generation of novel materials. In this paper, correlations based on gene expression programming (GEP) were generated to predict the value of carbon dioxide solubility in three polymers. Results showed that the generated correlations could represent an outstanding efficiency and provide predictions for carbon dioxide solubility with satisfactory average absolute relative errors of 9.71%, 5.87%, and 1.63% for polystyrene (PS), polybutylene succinate-co-adipate (PBSA), and polybutylene succinate (PBS), respectively. Trend analysis based on Henry's law illustrated that increasing pressure and decreasing temperature lead to an increase in carbon dioxide solubility. Finally, outlier discovery was applied using the leverage approach to detect the suspected data points. The outlier detection demonstrated the statistical validity of the developed correlations. William's plot of three generated correlations showed that all of the data points are located in the valid zone except one point for PBS polymer and three points for PS polymer.
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Light olefins, as the backbone of the chemical and petrochemical industries, are produced mainly via steam cracking route. Prediction the of effects of operating variables on the product yield distribution through the mechanistic approaches is complex and requires long time. While increasing in the industrial automation and the availability of the high throughput data, the machine learning approaches have gained much attention due to the simplicity and less required computational efforts. In this study, the potential capability of four powerful machine learning models, i.e., Multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network, adaptive boosting-support vector regression (AdaBoost-SVR), recurrent neural network (RNN), and deep belief network (DBN) was investigated to predict the product distribution of an olefin plant in industrial scale. In this regard, an extensive data set including 1184 actual data points were gathered during four successive years under various practical conditions. 24 varying independent parameters, including flow rates of different feedstock, numbers of active furnaces, and coil outlet temperatures, were chosen as the input variables of the models and the outputs were the flow rates of the main products, i.e., pyrolysis gasoline, ethylene, and propylene. The accuracy of the models was assessed by different statistical techniques. Based on the obtained results, the RNN model accurately predicted the main product flow rates with average absolute percent relative error (AAPRE) and determination coefficient (R2) values of 1.94% and 0.97, 1.29% and 0.99, 0.70% and 0.99 for pyrolysis gasoline, propylene, and ethylene, respectively. The influence of the various parameters on the products flow rate (estimated by the RNN model) was studied by the relevancy factor calculation. Accordingly, the number of furnaces in service and the flow rates of some feedstock had more positive impacts on the outputs. In addition, the effects of different operating conditions on the propylene/ethylene (P/E) ratio as a cracking severity factor were also discussed. This research proved that intelligent approaches, despite being simple and straightforward, can predict complex unit performance. Thus, they can be efficiently utilized to control and optimize different industrial-scale units.
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Ionic liquids (ILs) have drawn much attention due to their extensive applications and environment-friendly nature. Refractive index prediction is valuable for ILs quality control and property characterization. This paper aims to predict refractive indices of pure ILs and identify factors influencing refractive index changes. Six chemical structure-based machine learning models called eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM), Categorical Boosting (CatBoost), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Adaptive Boosting-Decision Tree (Ada-DT), and Adaptive Boosting-Support Vector Machine (Ada-SVM) were developed to achieve this goal. An enormous dataset containing 6098 data points of 483 different ILs was exploited to train the machine learning models. Each data point's chemical substructures, temperature, and wavelength were considered for the models' inputs. Including wavelength as input is unprecedented among predictions done by machine learning methods. The results show that the best model was CatBoost, followed by XGBoost, LightGBM, Ada-DT, CNN, and Ada-SVM. The R2 and average absolute percent relative error (AAPRE) of the best model were 0.9973 and 0.0545, respectively. Comparing this study's models with the literature shows two advantages regarding the dataset's abundance and prediction accuracy. This study also reveals that the presence of the -F substructure in an ionic liquid has the most influence on its refractive index among all inputs. It was also found that the refractive index of imidazolium-based ILs increases with increasing alkyl chain length. In conclusion, chemical structure-based machine learning methods provide promising insights into predicting the refractive index of ILs in terms of accuracy and comprehensiveness.
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Formation damage is a well-known problem that occurs during the exploration and production phases of the upstream sector of the oil and gas industry. This study aimed to develop a new drilling mud formulation by utilizing eco-friendly bio-polymers, specifically Carboxymethyl Cellulose (CMC), along with nanostructured materials and a common surfactant, sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS). The rheological properties of the drilling fluid and the impact of additives on its properties were investigated at the micromodel scale, using a flow rate of 20 mL/h. The polymer concentration and nano clay concentration were set at two levels: 0.5 wt% and 1 wt%, respectively, while the surfactant content was varied at three levels: 0.1 wt%, 0.4 wt%, and 0.8 wt%. The results of the interfacial tension (IFT) analysis demonstrated a significant decrease in the interfacial tension between oil and water with the increasing concentration of SDS. Furthermore, following the API standard, the rheological behavior of the drilling fluid, including the gel strength and thixotropic properties of the mud, was evaluated with respect to temperature changes, as this is crucial for ensuring the inherent rheological stability of the mud. The rheological analysis indicated that the viscosity of the mud formulation with nanoparticles experienced a reduction of up to 10 times with increasing shear rate, while other formulations exhibited a decline of 100 times. Notably, the rheological properties of the Agar specimen improved at 150 °F due to its complete solubility in water, whereas other formulations exhibited a greater drop in viscosity at this temperature. As the temperature increased, drilling fluid containing nanostructured materials exhibited higher viscosity.
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Interfacial tension (IFT) between surfactants and hydrocarbon is one of the important parameters in petroleum engineering to have a successful enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operation. Measuring IFT in the laboratory is time-consuming and costly. Since, the accurate estimation of IFT is of paramount significance, modeling with advanced intelligent techniques has been used as a proper alternative in recent years. In this study, the IFT values between surfactants and hydrocarbon were predicted using tree-based machine learning algorithms. Decision tree (DT), extra trees (ET), and gradient boosted regression trees (GBRT) were used to predict this parameter. For this purpose, 390 experimental data collected from previous studies were used to implement intelligent models. Temperature, normal alkane molecular weight, surfactant concentration, hydrophilic-lipophilic balance (HLB), and phase inversion temperature (PIT) were selected as inputs of models and independent variables. Also, the IFT between the surfactant solution and normal alkanes was selected as the output of the models and the dependent variable. Moreover, the implemented models were evaluated using statistical analyses and applied graphical methods. The results showed that DT, ET, and GBRT could predict the data with average absolute relative error values of 4.12%, 3.52%, and 2.71%, respectively. The R-squared of all implementation models is higher than 0.98, and for the best model, GBRT, it is 0.9939. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis using the Pearson approach was utilized to detect correlation coefficients of the input parameters. Based on this technique, the results of sensitivity analysis demonstrated that PIT, surfactant concentration, and HLB had the greatest effect on IFT, respectively. Finally, GBRT was statistically credited by the Leverage approach.
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In gas-condensate reservoirs, liquid dropout occurs by reducing the pressure below the dew point pressure in the area near the wellbore. Estimation of production rate in these reservoirs is important. This goal is possible if the amount of viscosity of the liquids released below the dew point is available. In this study, the most comprehensive database related to the viscosity of gas condensate, including 1370 laboratory data was used. Several intelligent techniques, including Ensemble methods, support vector regression (SVR), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), Radial basis function (RBF), and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) optimized by Bayesian Regularization and Levenberg-Marquardt were applied for modeling. In models presented in the literature, one of the input parameters for the development of the models is solution gas oil ratio (Rs). Measuring Rs in wellhead requires special equipment and is somewhat difficult. Also, measuring this parameter in the laboratory requires spending time and money. According to the mentioned cases, in this research, unlike the research done in the literature, Rs parameter was not used to develop the models. The input parameters for the development of the models presented in this research were temperature, pressure and condensate composition. The data used includes a wide range of temperature and pressure, and the models presented in this research are the most accurate models to date for predicting the condensate viscosity. Using the mentioned intelligent approaches, precise compositional models were presented to predict the viscosity of gas/condensate at different temperatures and pressures for different gas components. Ensemble method with an average absolute percent relative error (AAPRE) of 4.83% was obtained as the most accurate model. Moreover, the AAPRE values for SVR, KNN, MLP-BR, MLP-LM, and RBF models developed in this study are 4.95%, 5.45%, 6.56%, 7.89%, and 10.9%, respectively. Then, the effect of input parameters on the viscosity of the condensate was determined by the relevancy factor using the results of the Ensemble methods. The most negative and positive effects of parameters on the gas condensate viscosity were related to the reservoir temperature and the mole fraction of C11, respectively. Finally, suspicious laboratory data were determined and reported using the leverage technique.
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In the context of gas processing and carbon sequestration, an adequate understanding of the solubility of acid gases in ionic liquids (ILs) under various thermodynamic circumstances is crucial. A poisonous, combustible, and acidic gas that can cause environmental damage is hydrogen sulfide (H2S). ILs are good choices for appropriate solvents in gas separation procedures. In this work, a variety of machine learning techniques, such as white-box machine learning, deep learning, and ensemble learning, were established to determine the solubility of H2S in ILs. The white-box models are group method of data handling (GMDH) and genetic programming (GP), the deep learning approach is deep belief network (DBN) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) was selected as an ensemble approach. The models were established utilizing an extensive database with 1516 data points on the H2S solubility in 37 ILs throughout an extensive pressure and temperature range. Seven input variables, including temperature (T), pressure (P), two critical variables such as temperature (Tc) and pressure (Pc), acentric factor (ω), boiling temperature (Tb), and molecular weight (Mw), were used in these models; the output was the solubility of H2S. The findings show that the XGBoost model, with statistical parameters such as an average absolute percent relative error (AAPRE) of 1.14%, root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.002, standard deviation (SD) of 0.01, and a determination coefficient (R2) of 0.99, provides more precise calculations for H2S solubility in ILs. The sensitivity assessment demonstrated that temperature and pressure had the highest negative and highest positive affect on the H2S solubility in ILs, respectively. The Taylor diagram, cumulative frequency plot, cross-plot, and error bar all demonstrated the high effectiveness, accuracy, and reality of the XGBoost approach for predicting the H2S solubility in various ILs. The leverage analysis shows that the majority of the data points are experimentally reliable and just a small number of data points are found beyond the application domain of the XGBoost paradigm. Beyond these statistical results, some chemical structure effects were evaluated. First, it was shown that the lengthening of the cation alkyl chain enhances the H2S solubility in ILs. As another chemical structure effect, it was shown that higher fluorine content in anion leads to higher solubility in ILs. These phenomena were confirmed by experimental data and the model results. Connecting solubility data to the chemical structure of ILs, the results of this study can further assist to find appropriate ILs for specialized processes (based on the process conditions) as solvents for H2S.
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Carbon dioxide (CO2) has an essential role in most enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods in the oil industry. Oil swelling and viscosity reduction are the dominant mechanisms in an immiscible CO2-EOR process. Besides numerous CO2 applications in EOR, most oil reservoirs do not have access to natural CO2, and capturing it from flue gas and other sources is costly. Flue gases are available in huge quantities at a significantly lower price and can be considered economically viable agents for EOR operations. In this work, four powerful machine learning algorithms, namely, extra tree (ET), random forest (RF), gradient boosting (GBoost), and light gradient boosted machine (LightGBM) were utilized to accurately estimate the viscosity of CO2-N2 mixtures. To this aim, a databank was employed, containing 3036 data points over wide ranges of pressures and temperatures. Temperature, pressure, and CO2 mole fraction were applied as input parameters, and the viscosity of the CO2-N2 mixture was the output. The RF smart model had the highest precision with the lowest average absolute percent relative error (AAPRE) of 1.58%, root mean square error (RMSE) of 2.221, and determination coefficient (R 2) of 0.9993. The trend analysis showed that the RF model could precisely predict the real physical behavior of the CO2-N2 viscosity variation. Finally, the outlier detection was performed using the leverage approach to demonstrate the validity of the utilized databank and the applicability area of the developed RF model. Accordingly, nearly 96% of the data points seemed to be dependable and valid, and the rest of them were located in the suspected and out-of-leverage data zones.
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Decreasing the conventional sources of oil reservoirs attracts researchers' attention to the tertiary recovery of oil reservoirs, such as in-situ catalytic upgrading. In this contribution, the response surface methodology (RSM) approach and multi-objective optimization were utilized to investigate the effect of reaction temperature and catalysts soaking time on the concentration distribution of upgraded oil samples. To this end, 22 sets of experimental oil upgrading over Ni-W-Mo catalyst were utilized for the statistical modeling. Then, optimization based on the minimum reaction temperature, catalysts soaking time, gas, and residue wt.% was performed. Also, correlations for the prediction of concentration of different fractions (residue, vacuum gas oil (VGO), distillate, naphtha, and gases) as a function of independent factors were developed. Statistical results revealed that RSM model is in good agreement with experimental data and high coefficients of determination (R2 = 0.96, 0.945, 0.97, 0.996, 0.89) are the witness for this claim. Finally, based on multi-objective optimization, 378.81 °C and 17.31 h were obtained as the optimum upgrading condition. In this condition, the composition of residue, VGO, distillate, naphtha, and gases are 6.798%, 39.23%, 32.93%, 16.865%, and 2.896%, respectively, and the optimum condition is worthwhile for the pilot and industrial application of catalyst injection during in-situ oil upgrading.
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Asphaltene precipitation and its adsorption on different surfaces are challenging topics in the upstream and downstream of the oil industries and the environment. In this research, the phenomenon of asphaltenes adsorption in the presence and absence of water on the surface of magnetite, hematite, calcite, and dolomite nanoparticles (NPs) was investigated. Five asphaltenes of different origins, four NPs as adsorbents and Persian Gulf water were used for three-phase (asphaltene/toluene solution + NPs + water) experiments. Characterization of asphaltenes and NPs was performed using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopic (FTIR), dynamic light scattering (DLS), elemental analysis, and field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM). Adsorption experiments were performed in two- (asphaltene/toluene solution + NPs) and three-phase systems. The results showed that the most effective parameters for asphaltene adsorption onto these NPs are the asphaltene composition, namely nitrogen content, and the aromaticity of asphaltenes. The significant effects of these parameters were also confirmed by the relevancy factor function as a sensitivity analysis. In the competition of asphaltene adsorption capacity by NPs, iron oxide NPs had the highest adsorption (Magnetite NPs > Hematite NPs > Calcite NPs > Dolomite NPs). From the results of the experiments in the presence of water phase, it could be pointed out that the asphaltenes adsorption onto the NPs was accompanied by a decrease compared to the experiments in the absence of water. The modeling also showed that physical adsorption has a significant contribution to the asphaltenes adsorption on the surface of iron oxides and lime NPs. The results of this research can assist in a better understanding of the asphaltene adsorption phenomenon and the role of iron oxide and lime NPs in solving this problem.
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Corrosion protection of metals is of paramount importance in different sectors of industry. One of the emerging techniques to prevent or reduce the damaging effects of this phenomenon is to apply superhydrophobic coatings on the susceptible surfaces. In this study, corrosion protection of steel is investigated by fabricating superhydrophobic coatings, using one-step electrodeposition process of nanosilica hybrid film and spraying process of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) on steel surface and also preparation of micro/nano-composite coatings. The anti-corrosion behavior of the nanosilica hybrid film and PTFE coating with two types of microparticles including Al2O3 powder and glass beads in primer layer, and overcoat layer with and without SiO2 nanoparticles is studied. TOEFL polarization and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) tests are conducted on coated steel samples to examine their corrosion performance in 3.5 wt% NaCl solution at a temperature of 25 °C. The results showed that the combination of superhydrophobic properties and low conductivity significantly improves the corrosion resistance. Evaluating the effect of adding SiO2 nanoparticles to the overcoat layer in PTFE coating showed that the nanoparticles improve the corrosion resistance of PTFE coatings by sealing up some defects and pores in the coating. Investigation of corrosion resistance of coatings showed that, the corrosion resistance of nanosilica film is lower than that of PTFE coatings. The best sample obtained in this study, namely the PTFE coating with glass beads microparticles in primer layer and SiO2 nanoparticles in overcoat layer, reduced the corrosion rate by nearly 80 times.
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Knowledge of the solubilities of hydrocarbon components of natural gas in pure water and aqueous electrolyte solutions is important in terms of engineering designs and environmental aspects. In the current work, six machine-learning algorithms, namely Random Forest, Extra Tree, adaptive boosting support vector regression (AdaBoost-SVR), Decision Tree, group method of data handling (GMDH), and genetic programming (GP) were proposed for estimating the solubility of pure and mixture of methane, ethane, propane, and n-butane gases in pure water and aqueous electrolyte systems. To this end, a huge database of hydrocarbon gases solubility (1836 experimental data points) was prepared over extensive ranges of operating temperature (273-637 K) and pressure (0.051-113.27 MPa). Two different approaches including eight and five inputs were adopted for modeling. Moreover, three famous equations of state (EOSs), namely Peng-Robinson (PR), Valderrama modification of the Patel-Teja (VPT), and Soave-Redlich-Kwong (SRK) were used in comparison with machine-learning models. The AdaBoost-SVR models developed with eight and five inputs outperform the other models proposed in this study, EOSs, and available intelligence models in predicting the solubility of mixtures or/and pure hydrocarbon gases in pure water and aqueous electrolyte systems up to high-pressure and high-temperature conditions having average absolute relative error values of 10.65% and 12.02%, respectively, along with determination coefficient of 0.9999. Among the EOSs, VPT, SRK, and PR were ranked in terms of good predictions, respectively. Also, the two mathematical correlations developed with GP and GMDH had satisfactory results and can provide accurate and quick estimates. According to sensitivity analysis, the temperature and pressure had the greatest effect on hydrocarbon gases' solubility. Additionally, increasing the ionic strength of the solution and the pseudo-critical temperature of the gas mixture decreases the solubilities of hydrocarbon gases in aqueous electrolyte systems. Eventually, the Leverage approach has revealed the validity of the hydrocarbon solubility databank and the high credit of the AdaBoost-SVR models in estimating the solubilities of hydrocarbon gases in aqueous solutions.