Prediction model of moisture content in spray drying of ceramic slurry based on IMFO-BPNN

The final particle moisture content of ceramic slurry spray drying affects the processing, product quality, and process energy consumption. While the real-time moisture content determination is very difficult for spray drying process due to nonlinear, severe lag, interference factors, and complexity of the systems, the high temperature, high humidity drying environment and short drying process. In current work, an improved moth optimization (IMFO) algorithm combined with backpropagation neural network (BPNN) was proposed to predict the moisture content of ceramic slurry particles during spray drying. The performance of the model is trained and tested. Results demonstrate that IMFO has better convergence ability and speed compared to other algorithms such as particle swarm optimization (PSO) and gravitational search algorithm (GSA). The IMFO-BPNN model achieves a MAE of 0.0293, RMSE of 0.0383, and R2 value of 0.9113, outperforming the prediction performance of BPNN and MFO-BPNN models. The absolute error rate of the IMFO-BPNN model (0–5%) is lower compared to BPNN (5–10%) and MFO-BPNN model (>10%), showcasing superior accuracy in predicting moisture content. This mathematical model established in the study provides an efficient, accurate, and nondestructive method for predicting the drying endpoint of ceramic slurry spray drying.