Abstract
Enormous consumption of fossil fuel resources has risked energy accessibility in the upcoming years. The price fluctuation and depletion rate of fossil fuels instigate the urgent need for searching their reliable substitute. The current study tries to address these issues by presenting butanol as a replacement for gasoline in SI engines at various speeds and loading conditions. The emission and performance parameters were ascertained for eight distinct butanol-gasoline fuel blends. The oxygenated butanol substantially increases engine efficiency and boosts power with lower fuel consumption. The carbon emissions were also observed to be lower in comparison with gasoline. Furthermore, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach was used in predicting engine performance running on the butanol blends. The correlation coefficients for the data training, validation, and testing were found to be 0.99986, 0.99942, and 0.99872, respectively. It was confirmed that the ANN predicted results were in accordance with the established statistical criteria. ANN was paired with Response Surface Methodology (RSM) technique to comprehend the influence of the sole design parameters along with their statistical interactions controlling the responses. Similarly, the R(2) value of responses in case of RSM were close to unity and mean relative errors (MRE) were confined under specified range. A comparative study between ANN and RSM models unveiled that the ANN model should be preferred. Therefore, a joint utilization of the RSM and ANN can be more effective for reliable statistical interactions and predictions.