Application of Artificial Neural Network for Internal Combustion Engines: A State of the Art Review

The automotive industry is facing a crucial time. The transformation from internal combustion engines to new electrical technologies requires enormous investment, and hence the IC engines are likely to serve as a means of transportation for the coming decades. The search for sustainable green alternative fuel and operating parameter optimization is a current feasible solution and is a critical issue among the scientific community. Engine experiments are complicated, costly, and time-consuming, especially when the global economy is drastically down due to the COVID-19 pandemic and putting the limitation of social distancing. Industries are looking for proven computational solutions to address these issues. Recently, artificial neural network has been proven beneficial in several areas of engineering to reduce the time and experimentation cost. The IC engine is one of them. ANN has been used to predict and analyze different characteristics such as performance, combustion, and emissions of the IC engine to save time and energy. The complex nature of ANN may lead to computation time, energy, and space. Recent studies are centered on changing the network topology, deep learning, and design of ANN to get the highest performance. The present study summarizes the application of ANN to predict and optimize the complicated characteristics of various types of engines with different fuels. The study aims to investigate the network topologies adopted to design the model and thereafter statistical evaluation of the developed ANN models. A comparison of the ANN model with other prediction models is also presented.