Application of artificial neural networks (ANN) for modeling of industrial hydrogen plant

A back propagation feed forward artificial neural network (ANN) with three layers is used for modeling of industrial hydrogen plant. The required operating data for training of ANN is obtained by modeling and simulation of an industrial hydrogen plant. The operating data are calculated by changing effective parameters such as feed temperature, reformer pressure, steam to carbon ratio and carbon dioxide to methane ratio in feed stream. Tangent sigmoid transfer function is used in the hidden and output layer and the proposed neural network is trained with a gradient descent algorithm. The optimum number of neurons in hidden layer is determined as optimum value with minimizing of the mean square error (MSE). With changing of effective parameters, the model predicts temperature, pressure and mole fraction of hydrogen and carbon monoxide in the product of the hydrogen plant. The result can be used to gain better knowledge and optimize of the hydrogen production plants.