Artificial neural network for the prediction of physical properties of organic compounds based on the group contribution method

Abstract In the development and optimization of chemical processes involving the selection of organic fluids, knowledge of the physical properties of compounds is vital. In many cases, it is complex to find experimental measurements for all substances, so it becomes necessary to have a tool to predict properties based on the characteristics of the molecule. One of the most extensively used methods in the literature is the estimation by contribution of functional groups, where properties are calculated using the constituent elements of the molecule. There are several models published in the literature, but they fail to represent a wide variety of compounds with high accuracy and simultaneously maintain a low computational complexity. The aim of this work is to develop a prediction model for eight thermodynamic properties (melting temperature, boiling temperature, critical pressure, critical temperature, critical volume, enthalpy of vaporization, enthalpy of fusion, and enthalpy of gas formation) based on the group contribution methodology by implementing a multilayer perceptron. Here, 2736 substances were used to train the neural network, whose prediction capacity was compared with other reference models available in the literature. The proposed model presents errors ranging from 1% to 5% for the different properties (except for the melting point), which improves the reference models with errors in the range of 3%–30%. Nevertheless, a difficulty in the prediction of the melting point is detected, which could represent an inherent hindrance to this methodology.