Predicting Mechanical Properties of Rubber Compounds with Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines.

The quality of rubber compounds is assessed by rheological and mechanical tests. Since mechanical tests are very time consuming, the main idea of this work is to quest for strong nonlinear relationships between rheological and mechanical tests in order to reduce the latter. The multilayered perceptron and support vector machine combined with data preprocessing were applied to model hardness and density of the vulcanizates from the rheological parameters of the raw compounds. The results outline the advantage of proper data preprocessing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]