Applications of ANNs in flow and heat transfer problems in nuclear engineering: A review work

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have been applied to deal with flow and heat transfer problems over the past two decades. In the present paper, recent work on the applications of ANNs for predicting the flow regime, pressure drop, void fraction, critical heat flux, onset of nucleate boiling, heat transfer coefficient and boiling curve has been reviewed, respectively. As can be noted in this review work, various types of ANNs can be employed as predictors with acceptable precisions. At the end of this review, methods to improve performance of ANNs and further applications of ANNs in flow and heat transfer problems were introduced. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.