This study was designed to evaluate the ability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods including ANN, ANFIS, GRNN, SVM, GP, LR, and MLR to predict the relative energy dissipation (ΔE/Eu) for vertical drops equipped with a horizontal screen. For this study, 108 experiments were carried out to investigate energy dissipation. In the experiments, the discharge rate, drop height, and porosity of the screens were varied. Parameters yc/h, yd/yc, and p were input variables, and ΔE/Eu was the output variable. The efficiencies of the models were compared using the following metrics: correlation coefficient (CC), mean absolute error (MAE), root-mean-square error (RMSE), Normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) and Nash–Sutcliffe model efficiency (NSE). Results indicate that the performance of the ANFIS_gbellmf based model with a CC value of 0.9953, RMSE value of 0.0069, MAE value of 0.0042, NRMSE value as 0.0092 and NSE value as 0.9895 was superior to other applied models. Also, a linear regression yielded CC = 0.9933, RMSE = 0.0083, and MAE = 0.0067. This linear model outperformed multiple linear regression models. Results from a sensitivity study suggest that yc/h is the most effective parameter for predicting ΔE/Eu.
