Application of Artificial Neural Network for Prediction of Boride Layer Depth Obtained on XC38 Steel in Molten Salts

Abstract

This paper discusses an application of neural network system on the performance of boride layer thickness. Boriding treatment was carried out in three different molten salts consisting of borax (Na2B4O7) added to boron carbide (B4C), aluminum (Al) and silicon carbides (SiC). The substrate used in this study was XC38 steel. Borides layers involved in this work was obtained from a boriding treatment at the temperature range of 800-1050 °C with 50°C interval for 2, 4 and 6 h. A numerical experiment using normalized and binarized values was carried out, using a back-propagation algorithm in ANN. The modeling shows that for the three bath the depth of boride layer was predicted with good accuracy, with a highest performance of normalized values along experimental data range.