Modeling the solubility of light hydrocarbon gases and their mixture in brine with machine learning and equations of state

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.