Physics-based smart model for prediction of viscosity of nanofluids containing nanoparticles using deep learning

Abstract The traditional model-driven methods are not much efficient to predict the viscosity of nanofluids accurately. This study presents a novel approach of using physics-guided deep learning technique for predicting viscosity of water-based nanofluids from large dataset containing both experimental and simulated data of spherical oxide nanoparticles $\rm{Al2O3}$, $\rm{CuO}$, $\rm{SiO2}$, and $\rm{TiO2}$. Further, this study introduces a novel methodology of combining deep learning methods and physics-based models to leverage their complementary strengths. To the best of the author’s knowledge, theory-guided deep learning prediction model was never used to predict viscosity before. The theory-guided deep neural networks (TGDNN) model is trained by minimizing the mean square error (MSE) and regularization terms using Adam optimization technique. The investigations reveal that the values of R2, RMSE, and AARD% are, respectively, 0.999868, 0.001143, and 2.198887 on experimental testing dataset. The TGDNN model learns non-linear relationship among the input variables from the training data. Additionally, the results show that the proposed method performed better than the other well-known existing theoretical and computer-aided models to predict the viscosity in wide range with high level of accuracy.