Sensitivity Analysis of Oil Shale Retorting Process through Sobol and Fourier Amplitude Sensitivity Test (FAST)

Oil shale retorting process is conversion of kerogen shale particles into oil and gas. Uncertainties present in process variables challenge the plant operation design of oil shale retorting process. In this work, the effect of uncertainties present in various input variables is studied on shale oil yield and flue gases. This study is focused on evaluation of most sensitive input variables that affect the oil yield. Oil shale retorting plant data is generated through interfacing of Aspen Plus, MS Excel 2010 and MATLAB R2018a. Least square boosting (LSBoost) model was used for virtual sensing of generated data and predicted the target outputs. Sensitivity analysis was performed using Sobol and Fourier amplitude sensitivity test to evaluate the effect of individual input variable on target outcomes of the process.