Comparison of RSM and ANN Optimization Techniques and Modeling of Ultrasonic Energy Assisted Trans-esterification of Salviniaceae Filiculoides Oil Blended to Biodiesel

For the transesterification of biodiesel from Azolla oil, the safe and successful use of feed stocks is a very significant prerequisite. It is of high importance to determine the optimal reaction parameters to maximize the yield of low-cost biodiesel generated from Azolla oil. Ultrasonic energy was used in this work for the development of biodiesel from Azolla oil catalyzed by the KOH catalyst under different conditions. The effect on the transesterification of Azolla Oil to biodiesel of four reaction parameters, namely the methanol/Azolla oil molar ratio (A), KOH catalyst concentration (B), reaction time (C) and reaction temperature (D) were considered. In order to optimize the effects of reaction parameters for the transesterification of Azolla oil to biodiesel, response surface methodology (RSM) based on central composite rotatable design (CCRD) is applied. To obtain a good correlation between the input reaction parameters and the output response parameter (FAME yield) from Azolla oil to biodiesel, an artificial neural network (ANN) model with two feed-forward back-propagation neural-network architecture Multilayer Perceptron Network (MLP) and Radial Basis Function Network (RBFN) was developed. With the experimental information obtained from the RSM model, the built ANN models were trained and evaluated. Absolute Average Deviation (AAD), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and coefficient of determination were statistically compared with the predictive capacity of both RSM and ANN models (R2). The statistical analysis showed that the measured FAME yield from both the RSM and ANN models was able to predict the FAME yield, and the findings limited the ANN model to the much more reliable FAME yield prediction compared to the RSM model.