Chemical Engineering Communications, Vol.204, No.10, 1187-1201, 2017
Prediction of thermodynamic properties of polyvinylpyrrolidone solutions by artificial neural networks coupled with genetic algorithm
In the present study, the artificial neural networks coupled with the genetic algorithm (ANN-GA) models were used to predict the thermodynamic properties of polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) solutions in water and ethanol at various temperatures, mass fractions, and molecular weights of polymer. The genetic algorithm (GA) was used to find the best weights and biases of the network and improve the performance of ANNs. The proposed model was composed of three input variables including the temperature of the solution, the mass fraction, and molecular weight of the polymer. Density, viscosity, and surface tension of PVP solutions with various molecular weights (10,000, 25,000, and 40,000) in water and ethanol have been measured in the temperature range 20-55 degrees C and various mass fractions of polymer. The ANN-GA models were trained by the experimental datasets and the prediction of density, surface tension, and viscosity of PVP solutions was performed using these models. The predicted values were compared with the experimental ones and the mean absolute relative error was less than 0.5% for the density and surface tension and about 3% for the viscosity of solutions.
Keywords:Artificial neural networks;density;genetic algorithm;polyvinylpyrrolidone solutions;surface tension;viscosity