Modeling of kinetic adsorption of natural surfactants on sandstone minerals: Spotlight on accurate prediction and data evaluation

Surfactant injection is a tertiary enhanced oil recovery (EOR) method which aims to improve trapped oil production by wettability alteration of rock surface and also interfacial tension reduction. Surfactants adsorption is an important parameter which needs to be considered before their application in EOR methods. In this paper, least square support vector machine was used as a robust approach for accurate prediction and modeling surfactants adsorption on sandstone rocks. Coupled simulated annealing was utilized for model optimization. The proposed model has the advantageous of generality, simplicity and accuracy compared to the previous well-known kinetic models. Results of graphical and statistical analyses illustrated that the proposed model has the highest accuracy and efficiency compared to the other models. Moreover, the highest reliability of the proposed model was proven by evaluating its results over the input parameters. Afterward, the most effective input parameters on adsorption density were investigated by employing sensitivity analysis. [Display omitted] •New robust model is proposed for natural surfactants adsorption on sandstone rocks.•There is an excellent agreement between the proposed model results and actual data.•The proposed model has the best performance in comparison to the well-known models.•The proposed model overcomes the challenges of using other adsorption models.•Sensitivity analysis is performed to find the most effective influencing parameters.