METHOD: Eight pseudoternary phase triangles, containing ethyl oleate as the oil component and a mixture of two nonionic surfactants and n-alcohol or 1,2-alkanediol as a cosurfactant, were constructed and used for training, testing, and validation purposes. A total of 21 molecular descriptors were calculated for each cosurfactant. A genetic algorithm was used to select important molecular descriptors, and a supervised artificial neural network with two hidden layers was used to correlate selected descriptors and the weight ratio of components in the system with the observed phase behavior.
RESULTS: The results proved the dominant role of the chemical composition, hydrophile-lipophile balance, length of hydrocarbon chain, molecular volume, and hydrocarbon volume of cosurfactant. The best GNN model, with 14 inputs and two hidden layers with 14 and 9 neurons, predicted the phase behavior for a new set of cosurfactants with 82.2% accuracy for ME, 87.5% for LC, 83.3% for the O/W EM, and 91.5% for the W/O EM region.
CONCLUSIONS: This type of methodology can be applied in the evaluation of the cosurfactants for pharmaceutical formulations to minimize experimental effort.