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In this study, an artificial neural network (ANN) model was developed and compared with a rigorous mathematical model (RMM) to estimate the performance of an industrial heavy naphtha reforming process. The ANN model, represented by a multilayer feed forward neural network (MFFNN), had (36-10-10-10-34) topology, while the RMM involved solving 34 ordinary differential equations (ODEs) (32 mass balance, 1 heat balance and 1 momentum balance) to predict compositions, temperature, and pressure distributions within the reforming process. All computations and predictions were performed using MATLAB® software version 2015a. The ANN topology had minimum MSE when the number of hidden layers, number of neurons in the hidden layer, and the number of training epochs were 3, 10, and 100,000, respectively. Extensive error analysis between the experimental data and the predicted values were conducted using the following error functions: coefficient of determination (R2), mean absolute error (MAE), mean relative error (MRE), and mean square error (MSE). The results revealed that the ANN (R2 = 0.9403, MAE = 0.0062) simulated the industrial heavy naphtha reforming process slightly better than the rigorous mathematical model (R2 = 0.9318, MAE = 0.007). Moreover, the computational time was obviously reduced from 120 s for the RMM to 18.3 s for the ANN. However, one disadvantage of the ANN model is that it cannot be used to predict the process performance in the internal points of reactors, while the RMM predicted the internal temperatures, pressures and weight fractions very well.

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