Research on Outgoing Moisture Content Prediction Models of Corn Drying Process Based on Sensitive Variables

Accurate prediction of outgoing moisture content is the key to achieving energy-saving and efficient technological transformation of drying. This study relies on a grain drying simulation experiment system which combined counter and current drying sections to design corn kernel drying experiments. This study obtains 18 kinds of temperature and humidity variables during the drying process and uses Uninformative Variable Elimination (UVE) method to screen sensitive variables affecting the outgoing moisture content. Subsequently, six prediction models for the outgoing corn moisture content were developed, innovatively incorporating Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), Extreme Learning Machine (ELM), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The results show that eight sensitive variables have been screened to predict the moisture content of outgoing corn. The sensitive variables effectively reduced the redundancy and multicollinearity of data in the MLR model and improved the coefficient of determination (R2) of ELM and LSTM models by 0.02 and 0.05. The MLR prediction model established based on the full set of temperature and humidity data has an R2 of 0.910 and a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 0.881%, while the UVE-ELM and UVE-LSTM prediction models achieve a better fitting effect and prediction accuracy. The UVE-LSTM model is set with a batch size of 30, a learning rate of 0.01, and 100 iterations. For the training set of UVE-LSTM, the R2 value is 0.931 and the RMSE value is 0.711%. The UVE-ELM model, with sigmoid as the activation function and 14 neurons configured, runs fast and has the best prediction accuracy. The R2 values of UVE-ELM training set and validation set are 0.943 and 0.946, respectively, and the RMSEs are 0.544% and 0.581%. The models proposed in this study provide data reference and technical support for process optimization and automation control of the corn drying process.