Modeling plasma surface modification of textile fabrics using artificial neural networks

In this paper, a neural network approach is used to understand the effects of fabric features and plasma processing parameters on fabric surface wetting properties. In this approach, fourteen features characterizing woven structures and two plasma parameters are taken as input variables, and the water contact angle cosine and the capillarity height of woven fabrics as output variables. In order to reduce the complexity of the model and effectively learn the network structure from a small number of data, a fuzzy logic based method is used for selecting the most relevant parameters which are taken as input variables of the reduced neural network models. With these relevant parameters, we can effectively control the plasma treatment by selecting the most appropriate fabric materials. Two techniques are used for improving the generalization capability of neural networks: (i) early stopping and (ii) Bayesian regularization. A methodology for optimizing such models is described. The learning abilities and prediction capabilities of the neural net models are compared in terms of different statistical performance criteria. Moreover, a connection weight method is used to determine the relative importance of each input variable in the networks. The obtained results show that neural network models could predict the process performance with reasonable accuracy. However, the neural model trained using Bayesian regularization provides the best results. Thus, it can be concluded that Bayesian network promises to be a valuable quantitative tool to evaluate, understand, and predict woven fabric surface modification by atmospheric air-plasma treatment. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.