Abstract
Banana (Musa paradisiaca) peel extract (BPE) was used as an environmentally benign corrosion inhibitor for mild steel in 1.0 M HCl. The efficiency of BPE was assessed by monitoring the pH of HCl solution and the quantity of hydrogen gas evolved during the reaction, using gasometric and thermometric methods. Moreover, the effect of concentration and temperature on the inhibition efficiency was modelled and optimized by response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural network (ANN). It was observed that the evolution of hydrogen gas decreases with increasing concentration of BPE, while it increases with time for the various concentrations up till 8 min before attaining constant values. By numerical optimization of RSM, the optimum corrosion inhibition efficiency of 60.08% was obtained at 308.08 K and concentration of 7.44 g/L for gasometric method, while an optimum of 61.25% was obtained at 308 K and 7.50 g/L for thermometric method. Optimization of inhibition parameters with ANN revealed the optimum number of neurons for both gasometric and thermometric methods to be 7; while the MSE are 2.2788 and 2.7306, and R(2) are 96.21 and 98.86 respectively. Comparing the performance models of RSM and ANN: for gasometric method, R(2) was 98.93 for RSM and 96.21 for ANN, while for thermometric method, R(2) was obtained as 95.78 and 98.86 for RSM and ANN, respectively. Both RSM and ANN have demonstrated to be robust optimization techniques; particularly, ANN was found to give a good prediction of the available small dataset.