Study of CO₂ capture by synthesized composite and modelling with machine learning and response surface methodology

This research investigated and optimized the separation of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from natural gas in an adsorption column filled with grafted-beam nanofiber adsorbent. The main purpose of using ANN and RSM models in this manuscript is to compare these two methods in predicting the CO₂ adsorption capacity. In other words, it was made to find a suitable model that has the highest agreement with the experimental data. Also, the other purpose of using the RSM model is to detect the optimized empirical conditions. Moreover, two common ANN models are applied in this work, including a multilayer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function (RBF). The novelties of this work are explained as follows: (1) detecting the optimized synthesis factors of NF-PAN/PUGMA sorbent which possess the highest CO₂ adsorption capacity with the help of response surface methodology (RSM), (2) studying the simultaneous interaction of synthesis parameters on the CO₂ adsorption capacity with the help of both RSM and artificial neural networks (ANNs), (3) testing two types of ANN models including multilayer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function (RBF) to predict the effect of monomer volume percentage and irradiation dose on the CO₂ adsorption capacity. Indeed, finding the best model (ANN or RSM) can help engineers in practical applications predict CO₂ adsorption capacity using NF-PAN/PUGMA under different conditions without incurring high-priced chemical materials, electricity, or human resources. The validation results were examined using correlation coefficients (R²) of RSM, RBF, and MLP models. The correlation coefficients for the RSM, RBF, and MLP models were 0.9910, 0.9949, and 0.9968, respectively. Additionally, the average absolute relative deviation (AARD) values for the RBF and MLP models were 0.00046512 and 0.00045511, respectively, indicating that the MLP model is better than the RBF model. To identify the optimal network structure, the trial-and-error method was conducted for MLP and RBF models. The number of neurons was found at 12 and 45 for MLP and RBF, respectively. The optimized effective parameters were obtained using RSM: 25.80% GMA, 66.45% amine, and an irradiation intensity of 28 kGy.