Intensive petroleum activities in the Caspian Sea lead to a considerable oil pollution in the various parts of this region. Tar balls stranded on the south coast of the Caspian Sea evidently cause (and accelerate) this serious environmental threat. In this study, a poloxamine copolymeric surfactant is used to agglomerate tar balls in a system containing the solvent, antisolvent, and Caspian Sea tar balls. This research work is conducted to determine the cumulative size distribution of tar balls in the presence of a poloxamine copolymer. The evolution of tar ball aggregates is experimentally and theoretically investigated and the steady‐state size distribution of the tar balls is estimated by Back Propagation Artificial Neural Network (ANN‐BP) and a new evolutionary algorithm, called Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA). The average size of tar ball aggregates increases with time and reaches a maximum value. It then declines and eventually approaches a steady‐state condition so that an almost constant size for the particles is attained. The statistical analysis shows a good agreement between the predicted values (obtained by the neural network combined with ICA, known as ANN‐ICA) and the real data for the steady‐state size distribution of the aggregates. This research study can considerably help to further understand evolution of tar balls (that hit the beaches) and consequently to find effective and economical ways for tar balls removal from the beaches. © 2018 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 37: 1901–1907, 2018

In this study, two new correlations are proposed to predict the natural gas hydrate formation temperature as a function of pressure and specific gravity. The first correlation has been developed using Vandermonde matrix and the coefficients of the second correlation have been obtained by Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. The error analysis shows the good performance of the two new proposed correlations to predict hydrate formation temperature compared to correlations presented earlier and also the experimental values.