Predicting Viscosities of Heavy Oils and Solvent–Heavy Oil Mixtures Using Artificial Neural Networks

Abstract

This study investigates the potential of artificial neural networks (ANNs) to accurately predict viscosities of heavy oils (HOs) as well as mixtures of solvents and heavy oils (S–HOs). The study uses experimental data collected from the public domain for HO viscosities (involving 20 HOs and 568 data points) and S–HO mixture viscosities (involving 12 solvents and 4057 data points) for a wide range of temperatures, pressures, and mass fractions. The natural logarithm of viscosity (instead of viscosity itself) is used as predictor and response variables for the ANNs to significantly improve model performance. Gaps in HO viscosity data (with respect to pressure or temperature) are filled using either the existing correlations or ANN models that innovatively use viscosity ratios from the available data. HO viscosities and mixture viscosities (weight-based, molar-based, and volume-based) from the trained ANN models are found to be more accurate than those from commonly used empirical correlations and mixing rules. The trained ANN model also fares well for another dataset of condensate-diluted HOs.