Experimental investigation and modeling of thermal conductivity of CuO–water/EG nanofluid by FFBP-ANN and multiple regressions

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to predict the thermal conductivity of copper oxide (CuO) nanofluid by using feed forward backpropagation artificial neural network (FFBP-ANN). Thermal conductivity of CuO nanofluid is measured experimentally using transient hot-wire technique in temperature range of 20–60 °C and in volume fractions of 0.00125, 0.0025, 0.005 and 0.01% for neural network training and modeling. In addition, in order to evaluate accuracy of modeling in predicting the coefficient of nanofluid thermal conductivity, indices of root-mean-square error, coefficient of determination (R 2) and mean absolute percentage error have been used. FFBP-ANN with two input parameters (volume fraction and nanofluid temperature) and one output parameter (nanofluid thermal conductivity) in addition to two hidden layers and one outer layer which purelin, logsig and tansig functions are used was considered as the most optimum structure for modeling with neuron number of 4–10–1. In this study, among common methods of theoretical modeling of nanofluid thermal conductivity, theoretical method of Maxwell and also multivariate linear regression model was used for explaining the importance of modeling and predicting the results using neural network. According to this research, the results of indices and predictions show high accuracy and certainty of ANN modeling in comparison with empirical results and theoretical models.