A stochastic multiscale method for the prediction of the thermal conductivity of Polymer nanocomposites through hybrid machine learning algorithms

In this paper, we propose a hybrid machine learning method to predict the thermal conductivity of polymeric nanocomposites (PNCs). Therefore, a combination of artificial neural network (ANN) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) is applied to estimate the relationship between variable input and output parameters. The ANN is used for modeling the composite while PSO improves the prediction performance through an optimized global minimum search. We select the thermal conductivity of the fibers and the matrix, the kapitza resistance, volume fraction and aspect ratio as input parameters. The output is the macroscopic (homogenized) thermal conductivity of the composite. The results show that the PSO significantly improves the predictive ability of this hybrid intelligent algorithm, which outperforms traditional neural networks.