• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.3
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• pp.940-947
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• 2022

Meta-heuristic algorithms have found their place in optimization problems. Henry gas solubility optimization (HGSO) is one of the newest population-based algorithms. This algorithm is inspired by Henry's law of physics. To evaluate the performance of a new algorithm, it must be used in various problems. On the other hand, the optimization of the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) gains for load-following of a nuclear power plant (NPP) is a good challenge to assess the performance of HGSO. Accordingly, the power control of a pressurized water reactor (PWR) is targeted, based on the point kinetics model with six groups of delayed-neutron precursors. In any optimization problem based on meta-heuristic algorithms, an efficient objective function is required. Therefore, the integral of the time-weighted square error (ITSE) performance index is utilized as the objective (cost) function of HGSO, which is constrained by a stability criterion in steady-state operations. A Lyapunov approach guarantees this stability. The results show that this method provides superior results compared to an empirically tuned PID controller with the least error. It also achieves good accuracy compared to an established GA-tuned PID controller.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.281-291
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• 2022

Surmounting complexities in analyzing the mechanical parameters of concrete entails selecting an appropriate methodology. This study integrates a novel metaheuristic technique, namely satin bowerbird optimizer (SBO) with artificial neural network (ANN) for predicting uniaxial compressive strength (UCS) of concrete. For this purpose, the created hybrid is trained and tested using a relatively large dataset collected from the published literature. Three other new algorithms, namely Henry gas solubility optimization (HGSO), sunflower optimization (SFO), and vortex search algorithm (VSA) are also used as benchmarks. After attaining a proper population size for all algorithms, the Utilizing various accuracy indicators, it was shown that the proposed ANN-SBO not only can excellently analyze the UCS behavior, but also outperforms all three benchmark hybrids (i.e., ANN-HGSO, ANN-SFO, and ANN-VSA). In the prediction phase, the correlation indices of 0.87394, 0.87936, 0.95329, and 0.95663, as well as mean absolute percentage errors of 15.9719, 15.3845, 9.4970, and 8.0629%, calculated for the ANN-HGSO, ANN-SFO, ANN-VSA, and ANN-SBO, respectively, manifested the best prediction performance for the proposed model. Also, the ANN-VSA achieved reliable results as well. In short, the ANN-SBO can be used by engineers as an efficient non-destructive method for predicting the UCS of concrete.