Prediction of Hardness Distribution in Plasma Arc Surface Hardening Using Neural Network

Abstract

In this chapter, an attempt has been made to develop neural network models to predict the hardness distribution of hardened zone in plasma arc surface hardening process. The back propagation method with the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm was used to train the neural network models. Hardness distributions were collected by the experimental setup in the laboratory and the associated data were used to train the neural network models. Furthermore, the prediction of neural network models were compared with those obtained from a statistical regression models. It is confirmed experimentally that the hardness distribution can be accurately predicted by the trained neural network models. The accuracy of hardness distribution prediction using neural network is superior to that using other statistical regression models.