Mechanical properties prediction for carbon nanotubes/epoxy composites by using support vector regression

Abstract

Studies have shown there are several process/geometry parameters affecting the mechanical properties of the carbon nanotubes/epoxy composites. The relationship between the response and process/geometry parameters is highly nonlinear and quite complicated. It is very valuable to have an accurate model to estimate the response under different process/geometry parameters. In this paper, the support vector regression (SVR) combined with particle swarm optimization (PSO) for its parameter optimization was employed to construct mathematical models for prediction of mechanical properties of the carbon nanotubes/epoxy composites according to an experimental data set. The leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) test results by SVR models support that the generalization ability of SVR model is high enough. The statistical mean absolute percentage error for tensile strength, elongation and elastic modulus are 3.96%, 3.14% and 2.62%, the correlation coefficients (R2) achieve as high as 0.991, 0.990 and 0.997, respectively. This study suggests that the established SVR model can be used to accurately foresee the mechanical properties of carbon nanotubes/epoxy composites and can be used to optimize designing or controlling of the experimental process/geometry in practice.