Artificial neural network modeling of mechanical alloying process for synthesizing of metal matrix nanocomposite powders

An artificial neural network model was developed for modeling of the effects of mechanical alloying parameters including milling time, milling speed and ball to powder weight ratio on the characteristics of Al-8 vol%SiC nanocomposite powders. The crystallite size and lattice strain of the aluminum matrix were considered for modeling. This nanostructured nanocomposite powder was synthesized by utilizing planetary high energy ball mill and the required data for training were collected from the experimental results. The characteristics of the particles were determined by X-ray diffraction, scanning and transmission electron microscopy. Two types of neural network architecture, i.e. multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function (RBF), were used. The steepest descent along with variable learning rate back-propagation algorithm known as a heuristic technique was utilized for training the MLP network. It was found that MLP network yields better results compared to RBF network, giving an acceptable mapping between the network responses and the target data with a high correlation coefficients. The response surfaces between the response variables, i.e. crystallite size, lattice strain of the aluminum matrix and the processing parameters are presented. The procedure modeling can be used for optimization of the MA process for synthesizing of nanostructured metal matrix nanocomposites.