Predicting wax deposition using robust machine learning techniques

Abstract

Accurate prediction of wax deposition is of vital interest in digitalized systems to avoid many issues that interrupt the flow assurance during production of hydrocarbon fluids. The present investigation aims at establishing rigorous intelligent schemes for predicting wax deposition under extensive production conditions. To do so, multilayer perceptron (MLP) optimized with Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm (MLP-LMA) and Bayesian Regularization algorithm (MLP-BR) were taught using 88 experimental measurements. These latter were described by some independent variables, namely temperature (in K), specific gravity, and compositions of C1–C3, C4–C7, C8–C15, C16–C22, C23–C29 and C30+. The obtained results showed that MLP-LMA achieved the best performance with an overall root mean square error of 0.2198 and a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.9971. The performance comparison revealed that MLP-LMA outperforms the prior approaches in the literature.