Prediction of formation enthalpies for Al2X-type intermetallics using back-propagation neural network

Abstract A back-propagation artificial neural network (ANN) was established to predict the formation enthalpies of Al 2 X-type intermetallics as a function of some physical parameters. These physical parameters include the electronegativity difference, the electron density difference, the atomic size difference, and the electron–atom ratio ( e / a ). The values calculated by the ANN method agree with experiments well to typically within 10%, indicating that the well-trained back-propagation (BP) neural network is feasible, and can precisely predict the formation enthalpies of Al 2 X-type intermetallics. The method comparison based on the predicted formation enthalpies suggests that our ANN method is superior to Miedema's model. Some trends of formation enthalpies for Al 2 X-type intermetallics were also observed from the ANN.