Artificial Neural Network (FFBP-ANN) Based Grey Relational Analysis for Modeling Dyestuff Solubility in Supercritical CO2 with Ethanol as the Co-Solvent

The research on dye solubility modeling in supercritical carbon dioxide is gaining prominence over the past few decades. A simple and ubiquitous model that is capable of accurately predicting the solubility in supercritical carbon dioxide would be invaluable for industrial and research applications. In this study, we present such a model for predicting dye solubility in supercritical carbon dioxide with ethanol as the co-solvent for a qualitatively diverse sample of eight dyes. A feed forward back propagation - artificial neural network model based on Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm was constructed with seven input parameters for solubility prediction, the network architecture was optimized to be [7-7-1] with mean absolute error, mean square error, root mean square error and Nash-Sutcliffe coefficient to be 0.026, 0.0016, 0.04 and 0.9588 respectively. Further, Pearson-product moment correlation analysis was performed to assess the relative importance of the parameters considered in the ANN model. A total of twelve prevalent semiempirical equations were also studied to analyze their efficiency in correlating to the solubility of the prepared sample. Mendez-Teja model was found to be relatively efficient with root mean square error and mean absolute error to be 0.094 and 0.0088 respectively. Furthermore, Grey relational analysis was performed and the optimum regime of temperature and pressure were identified with dye solubility as the higher the better performance characteristic. Finally, the dye specific crossover ranges were identified by analysis of isotherms and a strategy for class specific selective dye extraction using supercritical CO2 extraction process is proposed.