DEVELOPING A FUNCTIONAL MODEL EXTRACTED FROM

AN ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK FOR THE PREDICTION

OF FRICTION FACTOR IN THE TURBULENT FLOW REGIME
 OUTLINE
 Introduction
 Aim and Objectives
 Statement of problem
 Material and method of study
 Result and discussion
 Conclusion
 INTRODUCTION
 The human brain is a biological network made up of billions of
neurons which are arranged into bigger groups that specialize in
particular kinds of information processing such as images,
hearing, touch, smell, speech, and muscle control.

 Neural network is inspired after this biological neural network, as

in nature, the network function is determined largely by the
connections between its elements. It is an attempt to model the
human brain and this is the reason you can train a neural network
to perform particular functions by adjusting the values of the
connections (weights) between elements. Commonly neural
networks are adjusted, or trained so that a particular input leads
to the specific target output.
 Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is an intelligent data-driven
modeling tool that can capture and represent complex and non-linear
input/output relationships. They are massively parallel, distributed
processing systems that can continuously improve their performance
via dynamic learning.

 The artificial neural network is composed of thousands of artificial

neurons called processing units which are interconnected by nodes.
These processing units are made up of input and output units; where
the input units receive various forms and structures of information
based on an internal weighting system and the neural network
attempts to learn about the information presented to produce one
output report.

 ANN can also be employed as a function of approximation, pattern

recognition and classification, memory recall, prediction,
optimization and noise filtering
 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
The aim and objectives of this study include:

• To extract a functional model from the

Artificial Neural Network for the prediction
of friction factor in the turbulent flow
regime.
 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
 Artificial Neural network offers several advantages, which includes
requiring less formal statistical training, having the ability to implicitly
detect complex nonlinear relationships between dependent and
independent variables, ability to detect all possible interactions between
predictor variables, and the availability of multiple training algorithms.

 It also has its disadvantages which include its “black box” nature because
they provide little insight into what these models really do, greater
computational burden, and proneness to over-fitting.

 Previous works did not provide any applicable equation or function that
can be applied in the prediction of the friction factor even without access
to artificial neural network software. Therefore the need to investigate the
inner workings of the hidden layer of the artificial neural network not only
for predicting the friction factor in the turbulent flow regime but also
extract a functional model from the network.
 SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS STUDY
It is difficult to determine a good network
topology only from several inputs and outputs.
The fact is that a suitable number of hidden
layers can increase the ANN training time but
with high accuracy.

This project will draw attention to an ANN-based

functional model to be used for the prediction of
the friction factor in the turbulent flow regime.
 MATERIAL FOR STUDY

This project is a simulation-scale study using

MATLAB ANN toolbox.
 METHOD OF STUDY
The methods used for this study include:

 The data to be used for this project was generated using an iterative
solution to the implicit Colebrook’s equation. About 60,002 data set
each was generated using the values of the Reynolds's number (Re)
for turbulent flow regime, Relative roughness (ε/D) to get the friction
factor with EXCEL SOLVER .

 The network was trained by importing the data set generated from
Excel. The dataset were divided into three set; the training data set
being 75%, validation data set being 15% and the test data set being
15%. The network was trained using the Levenberg-Marquardt back
propagation algorithm and by default the number of epochs for the
network is set to 1000 epochs which due to the course of this project
was set to 4000 epochs.
 With 4000 epochs being specified for this model, this means that
that the network essentially trained the model over 4000forward
and backward passes with the expectation that the errors decreases
with each epoch reached hence giving an improved model.

 The performance evaluation used by MATLAB is the mean square

error which distributes the total error over the data points
considered.

 However, it does not give any particular information about the

performance of each individual data point. But it shows the
performance of the training, testing
and validation datasets compared with the Colebrook equation as
seen in the next slide
This plot can be easily used to debug the neural network during training, it gives a snapshot of
the training process and the direction which the network learns and this plot shows a good
learning rate.
 This is the regression plot that tells the responsiveness of the
output to the changes in the input and the closer the values to 1
the better the ANN model generated
This is the diagram showing the zero error achieved between the target value
and the predicted value so far with the ANN training
 DISCUSSION
 The performance of this ANN model can still constantly improved as it
is still being trained. The performance of an ANN increases with more
training and with the large amount of data set being used for the
training, the network will learn correctly the input out put
relationship.

 The “Genfunction” to be used for the extraction of the functional model

was automatically saved as inputted in the code used for the network
training .

 The performance of the network proved to be sensitive to adjustments

in parameters such as the network topology, learning rate and the
weight and biases which is a good thing I noted about the model
during training as it helped cut the use of unnecessary parameters.
The functional model extracted as shown in paper can be
applied easily as a solution to friction factor prediction in the
turbulent flow regime using any simulation software without
going through the rigorous process of training the data sets to
achieve the desired result.

And the mystery of the neural network as a “black box” has

been illuminated as I have been able to extract a model using
the weights and biases gotten from training the network and
this model can be applied to problems requiring the
prediction of friction factor in the turbulent flow regime.
 CONCLUSION
The functional model has been extracted using the weights
and biases generated from the network, tested and also
proven to work hence demystifying the mystery of the
Artificial neural network which over the years of research and
literature has always been a black box
 RECOMMENDATION
I recommend further training of the neural network
to derive an improved functional model as this will
make the subject of friction factor prediction using
Neural network a non-herculean task for
researchers, lecturers and students.
THANK YOU