STUDYING THE ABRASION BEHAVIOR OF RUBBERY MATERIALS WITH COMBINED DESIGN OF EXPERIMENT-ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK

In this study, an application of artificial neural network (ANN) has been presented in modeling and studying the effect of compounding variables on abrasion behavior of rubber formulations. Three case studies were carried out in which the experiment data were collected according to classical response surface designs. Besides developing the ANN models, we developed response surface methodology (RSM) to confirm the ANN predictions. A simple relation was employed for determination of relative importance of each variable according to ANN models. It was shown through these case studies that ANN models delivered very good data fitting and their simulating curves could help the researchers to better understand the abrasion behavior.