Knowing the thermodynamic and transport properties of liquid systems is very important in engineering for the development of theoretical models and for the design of new technologies. Models that allow accurate predictions of thermodynamic and transport properties are needed in chemical engineering calculations involving fluid, heat, and mass transfer. In this study, the modeling of viscosity deviation for binary and ternary systems containing benzyl alcohol, n-hexanol, and water, less studied in the literature, was carried out using Redlich and Kister (R-L) models, multiple linear regression (MLR) models and artificial neural networks (ANN). The viscosity of the binary and ternary systems was experimentally determined at the following temperatures: 293.15, 303.15, 313.15, and 323.15 K. Viscosity deviation was calculated and then correlated with mole fractions, normalized temperature, and refractive index. The neural model that led to the best performance in the testing and validation stages contains 4 neurons in the input layer, 12 neurons in the hidden layer, and one neuron in the output layer. In the testing stage for this model, the standard deviation is 0.0067, and the correlation coefficient is 0.999. In the validation stage, a deviation of 0.0226 and a correlation coefficient of 0.996 were obtained. The MLR model led to worse results than those obtained with the neural model and also with the R-L models. The standard deviation for this model is 0.099, and the correlation coefficient is 0.898. Its advantage over the R-L type models is that the influence of both composition and temperature are included in a single equation.
Keywords: ANN; benzyl alcohol; n-hexanol; viscosity deviation modeling; water.