Analysis of Temperature Profiles in Longitudinal Fin Designs by a Novel Neuroevolutionary Approach

Real application problems in physics, engineering, economics, and other disciplines are often modeled as differential equations. Classical numerical techniques are computationally expensive when we require solutions to our mathematical problems with no prior information. Hence, researchers are more interested in developing numerical methods that can obtain better solutions with fewer efforts and computational time. Heuristic algorithms are considered suitable candidates for such type of problems. In this research, we have developed a new neuroevolutionary algorithm that combines the power of feed- forward artificial neural networks (ANNs) and a modern metaheuristic, the Symbiotic Organism Search (SOS) algorithm. With our new approach, we have analyzed the simultaneous surface convection and radiation during heat transfer in different models of fins/heat exchangers. Longitudinal fins are considered with concave parabolic, rectangular and trapezoidal shapes. We have analyzed our problem in two scenarios and six sub-cases. Our solutions are of high quality, with minimum residual errors in all cases. We have established the quality of our results by calculating values of different performance indicators like Root-mean-square error (RMSE), Absolute error (AE), Generational distance (GD), Mean absolute deviation (MAD), Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE), Error in Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (ENSE). Statistical and graphical analysis of our results suggests that our approach is suitable for handling real application problems. We have compared our results with state-of-the- art results, and the outcome of our analysis points to the superiority of our approach.