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In this work, the Copper composites Cu-x wt. % B4C (x = 0, 5, 10, 15, 20) were fabricated for the metallurgical and mechanical property evaluation as per ASTM standards. The metallurgical characterization tests on the samples include x-ray diffraction, optical microscopy, and scanning electron microscopy with EDX. Further, pin-on-disc apparatus was used to investigate the tribological behavior of composite specimens. An SEM micrograph of the worn surface and wear debris, along with the Gwyddion software, has been used to discuss the wear mechanisms in detail. The Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) classifier model is also constructed to describe the wear behavior in more detail. The experimental results inferred that the addition of Boron carbide particles has enhanced the Copper's corrosion resistance in a 1 M HCl electrolyte solution from 30.34% to 74.2%, 75.08%, and 83.29% with B and C ions. Also, it significantly enhance the mechanical and tribological characteristics considerably. KEY WORDS: Powder metallurgy, Cu-B4C, Gwyddion, Wear, Artificial Neural Network Bull. Chem. Soc. Ethiop. 2023, 37(4), 959-972. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/bcse.v37i4.12 &nbsp

Artificial neural networks (ANN) are widely used for classification, and the training algorithm commonly used is the backpropagation (BP) algorithm. The major bottleneck faced in the backpropagation neural network training is in fixing the appropriate values for network parameters. The network parameters are initial weights, biases, activation function, number of hidden layers and the number of neurons per hidden layer, number of training epochs, learning rate, minimum error, and momentum term for the classification task. The objective of this work is to investigate the performance of 12 different BP algorithms with the impact of variations in network parameter values for the neural network training. The algorithms were evaluated with different training and testing samples taken from the three benchmark clinical datasets, namely, Pima Indian Diabetes (PID), Hepatitis, and Wisconsin Breast Cancer (WBC) dataset obtained from the University of California Irvine (UCI) machine learning repository.