Artificial Neural Network Models in Prediction of the Moisture Content of a Spray Drying Process

Spray drying is a unique drying process for powder production. Spray dried product must be free-flowing in order to fill the pressing dies rapidly, especially in the ceramic production. The important powder characteristics are; the particle size distribu-tion and moisture content of the finished product that can be estimated and adjusted by the spray dryer operation, within limits, through regulation of atomizer and drying conditions. In order to estimate the moisture content of the resultant dried product, we modeled the control system of the drying process using two different Artificial Neural Network (ANN) approaches, namely the Back-Propagation Multiplayer Perceptron (BPMLP) algorithm and the Radial Basis Function (RBF) network. It was found out that the performance of both of the artificial neural network models were quite significant and the total testing error for the 100 data was 0.8 and 0.7 for the BPMLP algorithm and the RBF network respectively.