Competition of ANN and RSM techniques in predicting the behavior of the CuO-liquid paraffin.

In this article, the estimation of CuO-liquid paraffin nanofluid viscosity was assessed using response surface method (RSM) and artificial neural network (ANN) methods. Since CuO-liquid paraffin nanofluid is Newtonian, two parameters of temperature and mass fraction were introduced in ANN and RSM techniques at 25–100 ° C , 0.25–6 wt.%. Both methods map the three-dimensional input space to one-dimensional space (viscosity). A response surface cubic model was approved by applying ANOVA and calculations showed an R2 value of 0.923 and a maximum margin of deviation of 10.482%. Efforts revealed that ANN with five neurons takes precedence over others. The R2 and maximum deviation margin were 0.994, and 3.266%, respectively. Finally, the comaprison of ANN and RSM methods indicated that the ANN method is more accurate than the RSM for conducting the nanofluid viscosity. The accuracy of ANN was such that for 50% of points, MOD was less than 1%. For MOD in the range of 0–2%, 90% of points can be predicted with an error of less than 2%. This figure for RSM was only 37%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]