Functional Link Neural Network for Predicting Crystallization Temperature of Ammonium Chloride in Air Cooler System

The air cooler is an important equipment in the petroleum refining industry.Ammonium chloride(NH4 Cl)deposition-induced corrosion is one of its main failure forms.In this study,the ammonium salt crystallization temperature is chosen as the key decision variable of NH4 Cl deposition-induced corrosion through in-depth mechanism research and experimental analysis.The functional link neural network(FLNN)is adopted as the basic algorithm for modeling because of its advantages in dealing with non-linear problems and its fast-computational ability.A hybrid FLNN attached to a small norm is built to improve the generalization performance of the model.Then,the trained model is used to predict the NH4 Cl salt crystallization temperature in the air cooler of a sour water stripper plant.Experimental results show the proposed improved FLNN algorithm can achieve better generalization performance than the PLS,the back propagation neural network,and the conventional FLNN models.