Comparison of Various Prediction Model for Biodiesel Cetane Number using Cascade-Forward Neural Network

Cetane number (CN) is one of the important fuel properties of diesel fuels. It is a measurement of the ignition quality of diesel fuel. Numerous studies have been published to predict the CN of biodiesels. More recently, the utilization of soft computing methods such as artificial neural networks (ANN) has received considerable attention as a prediction tool. However, most studies in the use of ANN for estimating the CN of biodiesels have only used one algorithm to train a small number of datasets. This study aims to predict the CN of 63 biodiesels based on the fatty acid methyl esters (FAME) composition by developing an ANN model that was trained with 10 different algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to predict the CN of biodiesels using numerous ANN training algorithms utilizing sizeable datasets. Results revealed that the ANN model trained with Levenberg-Marquardt gave the highest prediction accuracy. LM algorithm successfully predicted the CN of biodiesels with the highest correlation and determination coefficient (R = 0.9615, R2 = 0.9245) as well as the lowest errors (MAD = 2.0804, RMSE = 3.1541, and MAPE = 4.2971). Hence, the Cascade neural network trained with the LM algorithm could be considered a promising alternative to the empirical correlations for predicting biodiesel’s CN.