Machine Learning Approach to Predict Physical Properties of Polypropylene Composites: Application of MLR, DNN, and Random Forest to Industrial Data

Manufacturing polypropylene (PP) composites to meet customers’ needs is difficult, time-consuming, and costly, owing to the ever-increasing diversity and complexity of the corresponding specifications and the trial-and-error method currently used to satisfy the required physical properties. To address this issue, we developed three models for predicting the physical properties of PP composites using three machine learning (ML) methods: multiple linear regression (MLR), deep neural network (DNN), and random forest (RF). Further, the industrial data of 811 recipes were acquired to verify the developed models. Data categorization was performed to account for the differences between data and the fact that different recipes require different materials. The three models were then deployed to predict the flexural strength (FS), melting index (MI), and tensile strength (TS) of the PP composites in nine case studies. The predictive performance results differed according to the physical properties of the composites. The FS and MI prediction models with MLR exhibited the highest R(2) values of 0.9291 and 0.9406. The TS model with DNN exhibited the highest R(2) value of 0.9587. The proposed models and study findings are useful for predicting the physical properties of PP composites for recipes and the development of new recipes with specific physical properties.