Detailed experimentation and prediction of thermophysical properties in lauric acid-based nanocomposite phase change material using artificial neural network

The thermal conductivity (TC) of a nanocomposite phase change material (NPCM) may be improved by adding nanostructured materials to a Phase Change Material (PCM). To assess the heat transfer rate during the process of phase change, such as melting and freezing, an accurate TC prediction of NPCM is required. A Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FESEM) was utilized to examine the nanoparticle morphological study, and X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) analysis evaluated the crystalline structure. NPCMs were verified using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR). The goal of this research is to create an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) that guesses the TC and viscosity of Lauric Acid (LA) embedded with dispersed copper oxide (CuO) and aluminium oxide (Al2O3). A multi-layered feed-forward ANN (MLFFANN) is trained using the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) backpropagation algorithm. There are 130 experimental datasets in total, obtained from experiments with nanoparticle mass fractions ranging from 1.25 to 10 wt%. The minimum mean square error (MSE) for TC and viscosity is 4.6815 × 10−5 and 2.4681 × 10−5, respectively. The average absolute deviation (AAD) for TC and viscosity is 0.004249 and 0.003596, respectively, while the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) is 2.1835 % and 4.8197 % for TC and viscosity, and the correlation coefficients(R) are 0.992 and 0.975, respectively. The largest percentage variation between experimental values and ANN computed values for the liquid and solid phases, respectively, is 3.54 % and 0.832 %. It demonstrates that the constructed ANN prediction model predicts the increased TC and viscosity of NPCM for different nanoparticle loadings, temperatures, and oxide nanoparticles.