Modelling and Thermophysical Properties of TiO<inf>2</inf>-SiO<inf>2</inf>-CaO and SiO<inf>2</inf>-CaO-MgO Based Electrode Coatings for Offshore Applications

The present study aims to investigate the thermophysical behavior of shielded metal arc welding (SMAW) designed by using CaO-SiO2-TiO2-MgO systems for offshore applications. An extreme vertices design approach is used to formulate twenty-six SMAW electrode coatings. Thermophysical properties such as thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity, and specific heat of each coating powder were evaluated by the Hot-Disc apparatus. The analysis of weight loss & enthalpy was performed using a thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA). The structure and phases of the coating material were investigated using the X-ray diffraction (XRD) technique. Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) Spectroscopy technique has been used for the structural characterization of shielded metal arc welding SMAW electrode coatings powder. By using various regression models, individual, binary, and ternary coating constituents have been developed for physicochemical & thermophysical properties. Regression study has shown that whereas binary interaction increases the thermal conductivity of electrode coating, individual constituents have a decreasing influence. On the thermal diffusivity of the electrode coating, individual constituents have a synergistic effect whereas binary constituents have an anti-synergistic effect. While binary interactions have an increasing effect, MgO is the only individual component that has a synergistic effect on weight loss. The binary mixture CaO.TiO2, CaO.MgO, SiO2.MgO, and TiO2.MgO has a synergistic influence on enthalpy, but SiO2 is the sole individual constituent to do so. The generated artificial neural network (ANN) models are evaluated for prediction accuracy and contrasted using regression analysis.