Comparison of Artificial Neural Network and Different Mathematical Models for Estimation of Moisture Rate in Quince Fruit Drying

In this research, the process of drying the quince fruit and the effect of various parameters such as the drying air speed, time, temperature and thickness on moisture ratio were studied. 7 mathematical models were fitted to the data obtained from 27 series of experiments and the best model was selected. Modeling was also performed by artificial neural network. In this modeling, the effect of all input parameters on the drying process was investigated simultaneously. The selective network structure was considered multi-layer perceptron with the back-propagation algorithm. By researching the number of different hidden layer neurons and different transfer functions, 9 neurons and "logsig” transfer function were used for the hidden layer and "purelin” transfer function for the output layer. Modeling by artificial neural network predicted the simultaneous effect of the four input parameters with very high accuracy. The results showed that ANN modeling had better accuracy than the best mathematical model.