Application of Artificial Neural Networks for Producing an Estimation of High-Density Polyethylene

Abstract

Polyethylene as a thermoplastic has received the uppermost popularity in a vast variety of applied contexts. Polyethylene is produced by several commercially obtainable technologies. Since Ziegler–Natta catalysts generate polyolefin with broad molecular weight and copolymer composition distributions, this type of model was utilized to simulate the polymerization procedure. The EIX (ethylene index) is the critical controlling variable that indicates product characteristics. Since it is difficult to measure the EIX, estimation is a problem causing the greatest challenges in the applicability of production. To resolve such problems, ANNs (artificial neural networks) are utilized in the present paper to predict the EIX from some simply computed variables of the system. In fact, the EIX is calculated as a function of pressure, ethylene flow, hydrogen flow, 1-butane flow, catalyst flow, and TEA (triethylaluminium) flow. The estimation was accomplished via the Multi-Layer Perceptron, Radial Basis, Cascade Feed-forward, and Generalized Regression Neural Networks. According to the results, the superior performance of the Multi-Layer Perceptron model than other ANN models was clearly demonstrated. Based on our findings, this model can predict production levels with R2 (regression coefficient), MSE (mean square error), AARD% (average absolute relative deviation percent), and RMSE (root mean square error) of, respectively, 0.89413, 0.02217, 0.4213, and 0.1489.