Abstract
The key contribution of this paper is to determine the optimal operating parameters of the methane reforming process for hydrogen production. The proposed strategy contained two phases: ANFIS modelling and optimization. Four input controlling parameters were considered to increase the hydrogen: irradiation time (min), metal loading, methane concentration, and steam concentration. In the first phase, an ANFIS model was created with the help of the experimental data samples. The subtractive clustering (SC) technique was used to generate the fuzzy rules. In addition, the Gaussian-type and weighed average were used for the fuzzification and defuzzification methods, respectively. The reliability of the resulting model was assessed statistically by RMSE and the correlation (R-2) measures. The small RMSE value and high R-2 value of testing samples assured the correctness of the modelling phase, as they reached 0.0668 and 0.981, respectively. Based on the robust model, the optimization phase was applied. The slime mold algorithm (SMA), as a recent as well as simple optimizer, was applied to look for the best set of parameters that maximizes hydrogen production. The resulting values were compared by the findings of three competitive optimizers, namely particle swarm optimization (PSO), Harris hawks optimization (HHO), and evolutionary strategy HHO (EESHHO). By running the optimizers 30 times, the statistical results showed that the SMA obtained the maximum value with high mean, standard deviation, and median. Furthermore, the proposed strategy of combining the ANFIS modelling and the SMA optimizer produced an increase in the hydrogen production by 15.7% in comparison to both the experimental and traditional RSM techniques.