An Alternative Approach to Prediction of Critical Heat Flux: Projection Support Vector Regression

Critical heat flux (CHF) is one of the most crucial design criteria in other boiling systems such as evaporator, steam generators, fuel cooling system, boiler, etc. This paper presents an alternative CHF prediction method named projection support vector regression (PSVR), which is a combination of feature vector selection (FVS) method and support vector regression (SVR). In PSVR, the FVS method is first used to select a relevant subset (feature vectors, FVs) from the training data, and then both the training data and the test data are projected into the subspace constructed by FVs, and finally SVR is applied to estimate the projected data. An available CHF dataset taken from the literature is used in this paper. The CHF data are split into two subsets, the training set and the test set. The training set is used to train the PSVR model and the test set is then used to evaluate the trained model. The predicted results of PSVR are compared with those of artificial neural networks (ANNs). The parametric trends of CHF are also investigated using the PSVR model. It is found that the results of the proposed method not only fit the general understanding, but also agree well with the experimental data. Thus, PSVR can be used successfully for prediction of CHF in contrast to ANNs.