Investigating the Electronic Coefficients in Ne-Hg Mixtures: Comparing a Monte Carlo and Artificial Neural Network Model

Abstract

Electron coefficients such as drift velocity, ionization coefficient, mean electron energy and Townsend energy for different concentrations of Hg 0.1%, 1%, 10% and 50% in the Ne-Hg mixture at a reduced electric field were calculated using two approaches taking into account inelastic collisions: The Monte Carlo simulation, and an artificial neural network. The effect of Hg vapor concentration on the electron coefficients showed that insignificant additions of mercury atom impurities to Neon, starting from fractions of a percent, affect the characteristics of inelastic processes and discharge, respectively. The aim of this paper is to explore the new applications of neural networks. The Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm and artificial neural network architecture employed was presented in this work to calculate the electron coefficients for different concentrations of Hg in Ne-Hg mixtures. The artificial neural network has been trained with four models (M1, M2, M3, M4), and analysis of the regression between the values of an artificial neural network and Monte Carlo simulation indicates that the M2 output provided the best perfect correlation at 100 Epochs, and the output data obtained was closest to the target data required through using the different stages of artificial neural network development starting with design, training and testing.