Modeling the oil extraction from Niger seeds using the combinational pretreatment of Microwave- pulsed electric field with artificial neural networks

In this research to model the process of extracting oil from Niger seeds using the combinational pretreatment of microwave-pulsed electric field three microwave time levels of (0, 100, and 200 seconds) and three electric field intensity levels of (0, 2.5 and 5 kV/cm) were used and after applying these pretreatments, the oil of seeds were extracted using the screw press with different speeds (11 to 57 rpm) and the efficiency of oil extraction process, density, color, oxidative stability, phenolic compounds and protein amount of meal were considered. The artificial neural network tool was used to predict the variations process. Through studying and examining various networks, the feed forward back propagation network with 6-9-3 topologies and with correlation coefficient of more than 0.995 and mean squared error less than 0.001 using logarithm sigmoid activation function, resilient learning pattern and learning process of 1000 were determined as the best neural method. On the other hand the results indicated that an increase in the microwave time and also in the electric field intensity at first led to increase in the efficiency of oil extraction process but with more increase in these two parameters the efficiency amount of oil extraction process was decreased. Also with increase in the microwave time, electric field intensity and the rotational speed of screw press the acidity amount of oils was increased too. The results obtained from selected optimized models were evaluated too and these models with high correlation coefficient (over 0.918) were able to predict the variation process of oil samples produced using microwave-pulsed electric field pretreatment.