A multilayer neural network for determination of particle size distribution in dynamic light scattering problem

Solution of Dynamic Light Scattering problem makes it possible to determine particle size distribution (PSD) from the spectrum of the intensity of scattered light. As a result of experiment, an intensity curveis obtained. The experimentally obtained spectrum of intensity is compared with the theoretically expected spectrum, which is the Lorentzian line. The main task is to determine on the basis of these data the relative concentrations of particles of each class presented in the solution. The article presents a method for constructing and using a neural network trained on synthetic data to determine PSD in a solution in the range of 1–500 nm. The neural network has a fully connected layer of 60 neurons with the RELU activation function at the output, a layer of 45 neurons and the same activation function, a dropout layer and 2 layers with 15 and 1 neurons (network output). The article describes how the network has been trained and tested on synthetic and experimental data. On the synthetic data, the standard deviation metric (rmse) gave a value of 1.3157 nm. Experimental data were obtained for particle sizes of 200 nm, 400 nm and a solution with representatives of both sizes. The results of the neural network and the classical linear methods are compared. The disadvantages of the classical methods are that it is difficult to determine the degree of regularization: too much regularization leads to the particle size distribution curves are much smoothed out, and weak regularization gives oscillating curves and low reliability of the results. The paper shows that the neural network gives a good prediction for particles with a large size. For small sizes, the prediction is worse, but the error quickly decreases as the particle size increases.