Prediction of critical heat flux for water flow in vertical round tubes using support vector regression model

This paper deals with v-support vector regression (v-SVR) based prediction model of critical heat flux (CHF) for water flow in vertical round tubes. The dataset used in this paper is obtained from available published literature. The dataset is partitioned into two independent sets, a training data set and a test data set, to avoid overfitting problem. To train the v-SVR models with more informative data, the training data is selected using a subtractive clustering (SC) scheme, and then the remaining data is used as test data to evaluate the performance of the v-SVR models. Next, the parametric trends of CHF are investigated using the v-SVR models. The results obtained from the v-SVR models are compared with those obtained from the radial basis function (RBF) network, which is a kind of artificial neural networks (ANNs). It is found that the results of the v-SVR models are not only in better agreement with the experimental data than those of the RBF network, but also follow the general understanding. The analysis results indicate that the v-SVR models can be successfully applied to CHF prediction. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.