Prediction of hydrogen production by magnetic field effect water electrolysis using artificial neural network predictive models

Abstract

Developing an efficient water electrolysis (WE) configuration is essential for high-efficiency hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) activity. In this regard, it has been proven that adding a magnetic field (MF) to the electrolysis system greatly improves the hydrogen output rate. In this study, we developed a method based on a machine learning approach to further improve the hydrogen production (HP) system with MF effect WE. An artificial neural network (ANN) model was developed to estimate the effect of input parameters such as MF, electrode material (cathode type), electrolyte type, supplied power (onset voltage), surface area, temperature, and time on HP in different electrolyzer systems. The network was built using 104 experimental data sets from various electrolysis studies. In the study, the percentage contributions of the input parameters to the HP rate and the optimum network architecture to minimize computation time and maximize network accuracy are presented. The model architecture of 7–12–1 was obtained using the best-hidden neurons. The Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm was used to train the multi-layer feed-forward neural network. Moreover, the utilization of a range of categorical variables to improve ANN prediction accuracy is a significant novelty in this work. Results demonstrated that the output of the trained ANN model fitted well with the experimental data. The test's correlation coefficient (R) and mean squared error (MSE) were 0.973 and 0.01125, respectively, confirming its powerful predictive performance. This ANN application is the first novel viable model to perform prediction using a neural network algorithm in the electrolysis process for MF effect HP using both categorical and continuous data inputs.