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We introduce HANNA, the first hybrid neural network model that strictly complies with all thermodynamic consistency criteria for predicting activity coefficients and outperforms current benchmark methods in terms of accuracy and applicability. 

Predictive models of thermodynamic properties of mixtures are paramount in chemical engineering and chemistry. Classical thermodynamic models are successful in generalizing over (continuous) conditions like temperature and concentration. On the other hand, matrix completion methods (MCMs) from machine learning successfully generalize over (discrete) binary systems; these MCMs can make predictions without any data for a given binary system by implicitly learning commonalities across systems. In the present work, we combine the strengths from both worlds in a hybrid approach. The underlying idea is to predict the pair-interaction energies , as they are used in basically all physical models of liquid mixtures, by an MCM. As an example, we embed an MCM into UNIQUAC, a widely-used physical model for the Gibbs excess energy. We train the resulting hybrid model in a Bayesian machine-learning framework on experimental data for activity coefficients in binary systems of 1146 components from the Dortmund Data Bank. We thereby obtain, for the first time, a complete set of UNIQUAC parameters for all binary systems of these components, which allows us to predict, in principle, activity coefficients at arbitrary temperature and composition for any combination of these components, not only for binary but also for multicomponent systems. The hybrid model even outperforms the best available physical model for predicting activity coefficients, the modified UNIFAC (Dortmund) model. 

We present a generic way to hybridize physical and data-driven methods for predicting physicochemical properties. The approach ‘distills’ the physical method's predictions into a prior model and combines it with sparse experimental data using Bayesian inference. We apply the new approach to predict activity coefficients at infinite dilution and obtain significant improvements compared to the physical and data-driven baselines and established ensemble methods from the machine learning literature.