The influence of changes in active binder content on the control system of the moulding sand quality

Artificial neural networks are one of the modern methods of the production optimisation. An attempt to apply neural networks for controlling the quality of bentonite moulding sands is presented in this paper. This is the assessment method of sands suitability by means of detecting correlations between their individual parameters. The presented investigations were aimed at the selection of the neural network able to predict the active bentonite content in the moulding sand on the basis of this sand properties such as: permeability, compactibility and the compressive strength. Then, the data of selected parameters of new moulding sand were set to selected artificial neural network models. This was made to test the universality of the model in relation to other moulding sands. An application of the Statistica program allowed to select automatically the type of network proper for the representation of dependencies occurring in between the proposed moulding sand parameters. The most advantageous conditions were obtained for the uni-directional multi-layer perception (MLP) network. Knowledge of the neural network sensitivity to individual moulding sand parameters, allowed to eliminate not essential ones