Particle dispersion modeling in ventilated room using artificial neural network

Abstract

Due to insufficiency of a platform based on experimental results for numerical simulation validation using computational fluid dynamic method (CFD) for different geometries and conditions, in this paper we propose a modeling approach based on the artificial neural network (ANN) to describe spatial distribution of the particles concentration in an indoor environment. This study was performed for a stationary flow regime. The database used to build the ANN model was deducted from bibliography literature and composed by 261 points of experimental measurement. Multilayer perceptron-type neural network (MLP-ANN) model was developed to map the relation between the input variables and the outputs. Several training algorithms were tested to give a choice of the Fletcher conjugate gradient algorithm (TrainCgf). The predictive ability of the results determined by simulation of the ANN model was compared with the results simulated by the CFD approach. The developed neural network was beneficial and easy to predict the particle dispersion curves compared to CFD model. The average absolute error given by the ANN model does not reach 5% against 18% by the Lagrangian model and 28% by the Euler drift-flux model of the CFD approach.