Prediction of pressure evolution in non-venting self-pressurized liquid hydrogen tanks using artificial neural network approach

Liquid hydrogen (LH2) is a future energy carrier compared to most conventional fuels. One of the practical bottlenecks in non-venting LH2 tanks is to accurately predict the pressure evolution. Accordingly, many thermal models and correlations were developed; however significant deviations arose due to inherent complex thermal phenomena which have not been addressed yet. A general artificial neural network (ANN) model has been first developed based on 448 datasets amassed from different literature sources to predict the pressure evolution under different heat fluxes, initial filling ratios, as well as tank volumes and shapes. The model has been configured with a typical multi-layer feed-forward structure using a back-propagation learning algorithm and Levenberg-Marquardt training algorithm. For the ANN model, a preliminary optimization process has been conducted for reaching the optimal values for training-to-testing datasets ratio, learning parameters and optimum network structure. Besides, some criteria were set to evaluate the ANN model performance. The ANN model with the configuration of 5-11-11-1 was found to be adopted for such a prediction task. Compared to experimental results and literature models and correlations, the ANN model has been proven to predict the pressure evolution in non-venting self-pressurized LH2 tanks with a mean square error of 1.1779 × 10−5 s2, root mean square error of 0.0034 s, mean absolute error of 6%, mean relative error of 0.2% as well as a satisfactory correlation coefficient of 0.99934 between the network outputs and corresponding targets. This research work provides an effective modeling approach based on artificial neural network to solve one complex problem related with LH2 tanks with fast, accurate and consistent results. Also, the results of the present work can offer some practical guidance for the design of LH2 tanks. Further, the present work gives some insights into new application areas of ANN which will be the emphasis of future research work.