Optimal estimation of physical properties of the products of an atmospheric distillation column using support vector regression

Abstract

Atmospheric distillation column is one of the most important units in an oil refinery where crude oil is fractioned into its more valuable constituents. Almost all of the state-of-the art online equipment has a time lag to complete the physical property analysis in real time due to complexity of the analyses. Therefore, estimation of the physical properties from online plant data with a soft sensor has significant benefits. In this paper, we estimate the physical properties of the hydrocarbon products of an atmospheric distillation column by support vector regression using Linear, Polynomial and Gaussian Radial Basis Function kernels and SVR parameters are optimized by using a variety of algorithms including genetic algorithm, grid search and non-linear programming. The optimization-based data analytics approach is shown to produce superior results compared to linear regression, the mean testing error of estimation is improved by 5% with SVR 4.01 degrees C to 3.8 degrees C.