Effective Thermal Conductivity Modeling of Sandstones: SVM Framework Analysis

Among the most significant physical characteristics of porous media, the effective thermal conductivity (ETC) is used for estimating the thermal enhanced oil recovery process efficiency, hydrocarbon reservoir thermal design, and numerical simulation. This paper reports the implementation of an innovative least square support vector machine (LS-SVM) algorithm for the development of enhanced model capable of predicting the ETCs of dry sandstones. By means of several statistical parameters, the validity of the presented model was evaluated. The prediction of the developed model for determining the ETCs of dry sandstones was in excellent agreement with the reported data with a coefficient of determination value (R-2) of 0.983 and an average absolute relative deviation of 0.35%. Results from present research show that the proposed LS-SVM model is robust, reliable, and efficient in calculating the ETCs of sandstones.