Prediction of thermodynamic behavior of copolymers using equation of state and artificial neural network

A simplified procedure with minimum input information for predicting of the densities of copolymer melts is presented. This new correlation has been applied to the Tao-Mason (TM) equation of state to predict the volumetric behavior of copolymer melts including poly(ethylene-co-propylene) (PEP), poly(ethylene-co-vinyl acetate) (PEVA), poly(ethylene-co-metacrylic acid) (PEMA), poly(ethylene-co-acrylic acid) (PEAA), poly(ethylene-co-vinyl alcohol) (PEVOH), poly(styrene-co-acrylonitrile) (PSAN), and poly(acrylonitrile-co-butadiene) (PANB). Also another model such as an artificial neural network (ANN) based on backpropagation training with 13 neurons was used. The obtained results by TM and ANN models had good agreement with the experimental data with absolute average deviations of 1.34 and 0.49 %, respectively.