화학공학소재연구정보센터
Chemical Engineering & Technology, Vol.25, No.12, 1187-1192, 2002
Studies on the applicability of artificial neural network (ANN) in continuous stirred ultrafiltration
An artificial neural network model of a continuous stirred ultrafiltration process, is proposed in the present study, which is able to predict permeate volumetric flux and permeate concentration at different bulk concentration, stirrer speed, pressure and time. Because of the complexity in generalization of the phenomenon of ultrafiltration by any mathematical model, the neural network proves to be a very promising method for the purpose of process simulation. The network uses the Back-propagation Algorithm for evaluating the connection strengths, representing the correlations between inputs (bulk concentration, stirrer speed, pressure and time) and output (permeate concentration and flux). The network employed in the present study uses four input nodes corresponding to the operating variables, and two output nodes corresponding to the measurement of the performance of the network (flux and permeate concentration). Experiments were performed to constitute the learning databases for the continuous stirred ultrafiltration process using PEG-6000 solute, and cellulose acetate membrane of 5000 MWCO. The network employed in the present study uses two hidden layers, with the optimum number of nodes being thirty and twenty. A leaning rate of 0.3, and momentum factor of 0.4 was used. The results predicted by the model were in good agreement with the experimental data, and the average deviations for all the cases are found to be well within +/-10 %.