Experimental study and prediction using ANN on mass loss of hybrid composites

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to produce Al6061 metal matrix composites reinforced with silicon carbide (SiC) and graphite particulates and study their wear behavior and also to develop artificial neural network model to predict the mass loss of hybrid composites.

Design/methodology/approach

The hybrid composites were produced by using stir casting process. The experiments were conducted based on the central composite rotatable design matrix using pin‐on‐disc wear testing machine. The set of data collected from the experimental values were used to train a back propagation (BP) learning algorithm with one hidden layer network. In artificial neural network (ANN) training module, four input vectors were used in the construction of proposed network namely, weight percentage of SiC particles, weight percentage of graphite particles, applied load and sliding distance. Mass loss was the output to be obtained from the proposed network. After training process, the test data collected from the experimental values were used to check the accuracy of proposed ANN model.

Findings

The results show that the well trained one hidden layer network have smaller training errors and much better generalization performance and can be successfully used for the prediction of mass loss of hybrid aluminium metal matrix composites.

Originality/value

In this paper the ANN method was adopted to predict the mass loss of hybrid composites. It was found that artificial neural network can be successfully used for prediction of mass loss of composites.

Citation

Velmurugan, C., Subramanian, R., Thirugnanam, S. and Anandavel, B. (2012), "Experimental study and prediction using ANN on mass loss of hybrid composites", Industrial Lubrication and Tribology, Vol. 64 No. 3, pp. 138-146. https://doi.org/10.1108/00368791211218669