Abstract
The thermal conductivity of Fe3O4/water nanofluid was forecasted using two methods of artificial neural network (ANN) along with response surface method (RSM). For ANN methods, the optimal neurons number and for RSM, the usefulness of several predicting function was specified using R-square criteria, and margin of deviation (MOD). It was found that R-2 for ANN was 0.999 while for RSM, this figure was 0.998. The mean square error for the former and latter methods was 0.00038 and 0.0013, respectively. Taking into account 0.964% and 1.895% for ANN and RSM, it was concluded that ANN efficacy was superior to RSM. Moreover, ANN was able to predict all points with a MOD below 1%, while 70% of data points in the RSM technique have a MOD of less than 1%.