Estimation of Thermal Conductivity of Ionic Liquids Using a Perceptron Neural Network

On the basis of an artificial neural network (ANN), a model is proposed to predict the thermal conductivity of pure ionic liquids. A total of 209 data points from 21 different ionic liquids was used to train and test the proposed network. The optimum number of hidden layers was determined to be 1, with 13 neurons in the hidden layer and logarithmic–sigmoid and purelin functions as the transfer functions in the hidden and output layers, respectively. The results obtained reveal that the proposed network is able to correlate and predict the thermal conductivity of all of the pure ionic liquids with an overall absolute mean relative deviation percent (MARD %) of 0.5% and mean square error (MSE) of 1.2 × 10–6. The optimized network was also compared with literature correlations and a predictive group contribution method. The results indicate the rather good accuracy of the proposed neural network compared to the previously proposed literature methods.