Modeling of hydrogen separation through Pd membrane with vacuum pressure using Taguchi and machine learning methods

Abstract

The performance of hydrogen purification using palladium (Pd) membrane is analyzed by Taguchi and machine learning (ML) methods. Three system factors are considered: the feed gas mixture composition (i.e., H2, CO2, and H2O), retentate-side total pressure, and vacuum pressure. The Taguchi method designs the experimental cases based on the constructed orthogonal array. In addition, the hydrogen flux is investigated by the analyses of variance (ANOVA) and artificial neural networks (ANN) methods. The results show that the effects of the considered factors on the hydrogen permeation performance can be ranked as feed gas mixture composition > retentate-side total pressure > vacuum pressure. Both the retentate-side pressure and vacuum pressure present a positive effect on hydrogen flux. The average relative error of hydrogen flux between the experimental results and predictions by ANN is 2.1%, which proves that the ANN method is an effective technique for predicting the hydrogen flux through the Pd membrane. The ML classification test is then performed for hydrogen purity by three machine learning methods: decision tree (DT), support vector machine (SVM), and ensemble method. Among the various classification models, the Quadratic SVM model exhibits a relatively high average training accuracy but shows overfitting. However, the bagged model of the ensemble method can achieve an impressive training accuracy of 91.4% and a prediction accuracy of 85.7%.