Modeling of Solar Photocatalytic Degradation of Rhodamine B Dye by TiO2 Nanoparticles Using an Artificial Neural Network

Abstract An artificial neural network (ANN) model was developed for the photocatalytic degradation of rhodamine B by TiO 2 nanoparticles synthesized by the electrochemical method, under direct sunlight irradiation. The four inputs are: irradiation time, initial dye concentration, pH of the initial solution, and catalyst loading. The ANN model with 20 hidden neurons and with R 2 of 0.999 shows minimum values of the performance metrics of 0.169, 2.020, 1.531, and 0.215 for the mean square error, the root mean square error, the mean absolute error, and the mean absolute percentage error, respectively. The optimized ANN configuration of 4‐20‐1 shows a good fit with the experimental data. The result shows that the sunlight irradiation time has the main impact on rhodamine B degradation at ∼55 %.