Abstract
In the manufacture of yarn, predicting the effect of changing production conditions is vital to reducing defects in the end product. This study compares, for the first time, non-linear regression and artificial neural network (ANN) models in predicting 10 yarn properties shaped by the influence of winding speed, quenching air temperature and/or quenching air speed during production. A multilayer perceptron ANN model was created by training 81 patterns using the Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) algorithm. The hyperbolic tangent, or TanH, activation function and logistic activation functions were used for the hidden and output layers respectively. Results showed that the ANN approach exhibited a greater prediction capability over the nonlinear regression method. ANN simultaneously predicted all of the 10 final properties of a yarn; tensile strength, tensile strain, draw force, crystallinity ratio, dye uptake based on the colour strengths (K/S), brightness, boiling shrinkage and yarn evenness, more accurately than the non-linear regression model (R2=0.97 vs. R2=0.92). These results lend support to the idea that the ANN analysis combined with optimization can be used successfully to prevent production defects by fine tuning the production environment.