Due to the importance of identifying crop cultivars, the advancement of accurate assessment of cultivars is considered essential. The existing methods for identifying rice cultivars are mainly time-consuming, costly, and destructive. Therefore, the development of novel methods is highly beneficial. The aim of the present research is to classify common rice cultivars in Iran based on color, morphologic, and texture properties using artificial intelligence (AI) methods. In doing so, digital images of 13 rice cultivars in Iran in three forms of paddy, brown, and white are analyzed through pre-processing and segmentation of using MATLAB. Ninety-two specificities, including 60 color, 14 morphologic, and 18 texture properties, were identified for each rice cultivar. In the next step, the normal distribution of data was evaluated, and the possibility of observing a significant difference between all specificities of cultivars was studied using variance analysis. In addition, the least significant difference (LSD) test was performed to obtain a more accurate comparison between cultivars. To reduce data dimensions and focus on the most effective components, principal component analysis (PCA) was employed. Accordingly, the accuracy of rice cultivar separations was calculated for paddy, brown rice, and white rice using discriminant analysis (DA), which was 89.2%, 87.7%, and 83.1%, respectively. To identify and classify the desired cultivars, a multilayered perceptron neural network was implemented based on the most effective components. The results showed 100% accuracy of the network in identifying and classifying all mentioned rice cultivars. Hence, it is concluded that the integrated method of image processing and pattern recognition methods, such as statistical classification and artificial neural networks, can be used for identifying and classification of rice cultivars.
Calculating hydrocarbon components solubility of natural gases is known as one of the important issues for operational works in petroleum and chemical engineering. In this work, a novel solubility estimation tool has been proposed for hydrocarbon gases—including methane, ethane, propane, and butane—in aqueous electrolyte solutions based on extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm. Comparing the ELM outputs with a comprehensive real databank which has 1175 solubility points yielded R-squared values of 0.985 and 0.987 for training and testing phases respectively. Furthermore, the visual comparison of estimated and actual hydrocarbon solubility led to confirm the ability of proposed solubility model. Additionally, sensitivity analysis has been employed on the input variables of model to identify their impacts on hydrocarbon solubility. Such a comprehensive and reliable study can help engineers and scientists to successfully determine the important thermodynamic properties, which are key factors in optimizing and designing different industrial units such as refineries and petrochemical plants.
Estimating the solubility of carbon dioxide in ionic liquids, using reliable models, is of paramount importance from both environmental and economic points of view. In this regard, the current research aims at evaluating the performance of two data-driven techniques, namely multilayer perceptron (MLP) and gene expression programming (GEP), for predicting the solubility of carbon dioxide (CO2) in ionic liquids (ILs) as the function of pressure, temperature, and four thermodynamical parameters of the ionic liquid. To develop the above techniques, 744 experimental data points derived from the literature including 13 ILs were used (80% of the points for training and 20% for validation). Two backpropagation-based methods, namely Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) and Bayesian Regularization (BR), were applied to optimize the MLP algorithm. Various statistical and graphical assessments were applied to check the credibility of the developed techniques. The results were then compared with those calculated using Peng–Robinson (PR) or Soave–Redlich–Kwong (SRK) equations of state (EoS). The highest coefficient of determination (R2 = 0.9965) and the lowest root mean square error (RMSE = 0.0116) were recorded for the MLP-LMA model on the full dataset (with a negligible difference to the MLP-BR model). The comparison of results from this model with the vastly applied thermodynamic equation of state models revealed slightly better performance, but the EoS approaches also performed well with R2 from 0.984 up to 0.996. Lastly, the newly established correlation based on the GEP model exhibited very satisfactory results with overall values of R2 = 0.9896 and RMSE = 0.0201.