Thermodynamically consistent machine learning model for excess Gibbs energy
The excess Gibbs energy plays a central role in chemical engineering and chemistry, providing a basis for modeling thermodynamic properties of liquid mixtures. Predicting the excess Gibbs energy of multi-component mixtures solely from molecular structures is a long-standing challenge. We address this challenge with HANNA, a flexible machine learning model for excess Gibbs energy that integrates physical laws as hard constraints, guaranteeing thermodynamically consistent predictions. HANNA is trained on experimental data for vapor-liquid equilibria, liquid-liquid equilibria, activity coefficients at infinite dilution, and excess enthalpies in binary mixtures. The end-to-end training on liquid-liquid equilibrium data is facilitated by a surrogate solver. A geometric projection method enables robust extrapolations to multi-component mixtures. We demonstrate that HANNA delivers accurate predictions, while providing a substantially broader domain of applicability than state-of-the-art benchmark methods. The trained model and corresponding code are openly available, and an interactive interface is provided on our website, MLPROP.
Authors
- Thomas Specht (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0462-8968)
- Marco Hoffmann (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0801-4285)
- Stephan Mandt (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7836-7839)
- Hans Hasse (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4612-5995)
- Fabian Jirasek (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2502-5701)
- Quirin Göttl (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-5260-8870)
- Jakob Burger (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9376-9438)
Institutions
- University of Kaiserslautern (DE)
- Irvine University (US)
- Technical University of Munich (DE)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2026-04-14
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71430-y
- Primary Topic
- Neural Networks and Applications
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft