Application of artificial neural network and kinetic modeling for the prediction of biogas and methane production in anaerobic digestion of several organic wastes

In the current study, artificial neural network (ANN) and modified Gompertz equation (MG) were applied to develop integrated based models for the prediction of cumulative biogas and methane yield (CBY and CMY) from anaerobic digestion (AD) of several organic wastes. Volatile solid to total solid ratio (VS/TS), carbon content (C), carbon-to-nitrogen ratio (C/N) and digestion time (DT) were selected as input features for the implementation of ANN approach. Genetic algorithm (GA) was employed in order to optimize the ANN architecture as well as the kinetic parameters of the MG to provide reliable and fast learning for better prediction performance. To evaluate model performances, determination coefficient (R2) and root mean square error (RMSE) were used. Both the approaches performed well in predicting CBY and CMY and showed a good agreement with the experimental data. However, GA-ANN models exhibit smaller deviation and higher predictive accuracy with satisfactory RMSE and R2 of about 0.0045 and 0.9996 for CBY, and 0.0046 and 0.9998 for CMY, compared with GA-MG models. This evinces the effectiveness of the developed approach to forecast CBY and CMY and can be an effective tool for the scale up of anaerobic digestion units and technico-economic studies.