Pressure die casting is an important production process. In pressure die casting, the first setting of process parameters is established through guess work. Experts use their previous experience and knowledge to develop a solution for a new application. Due to rapid expansion in the die casting process to produce better quality products in a short period of time, there is ever increasing demand to replace the time-consuming and expert-reliant traditional trial and error methods of establishing process parameters. A neural network system is developed to generate the process parameters for the pressure die casting process. The system aims to replace the existing high-cost, time-consuming and expertdependent trial and error approach for determining the process parameters. The scope of this work includes analysing a physical model of the pressure die casting filling stage based on governing equations of die cavity filling and the collection of feasible casting data for the training of the network. The training data were generated by using ZN-DA3 material on a hot chamber die casting machine with a plunger diameter of 60 mm. The present network was developed using the MATLAB application toolbox. In this work, the neural network was developed by comparing three different training algorithms: i.e. error backpropagation algorithm; momentum and adaptive learning algorithm; and Levenberg-Marquardt approximation algorithm. It was found that the Levenberg-Marquardt approximation algorithm was the preferred method for this application as it reduced the sum-squared error to a small value. The accuracy of the developed network was tested by comparing the data generated from the network with those of an expert from a local die casting industry. It was established that by using this network the selection of process parameters becomes much easier, so that it can be used by a novice user without prior knowledge of the die casting process or optimization techniques.
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