The use of artificial intelligence techniques in a catalytic probe modeling

When studying atomic hydrogen interactions with solid surfaces, several problems appear, including the problem of atomic hydrogen concentration measurement. In this work we analyse the use of catalytic nickel probe for the H concentration measurement. We use novel artificial intelligence techniques to obtain differential equations that describe the behavior of the probe directly from measurements. The equations show that the recombination coefficient for the atomic H on the nickel surface does not change substantially with the probe temperature which means that the catalytic nickel probe could be used as a good indicator of the atomic H concentration in the gas. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.