The Bulletin of the Polish Academy of Sciences: Technical Sciences (Bull.Pol. Ac.: Tech.) is published bimonthly by the Division IV Engineering Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, since the beginning of the existence of the PAS in 1952. The journal is peer‐reviewed and is published both in printed and electronic form. It is established for the publication of original high quality papers from multidisciplinary Engineering sciences with the following topics preferred: Artificial and Computational Intelligence, Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology, Civil Engineering, Control, Informatics and Robotics, Electronics, Telecommunication and Optoelectronics, Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, Thermodynamics, Material Science and Nanotechnology, Power Systems and Power Electronics.

Journal Metrics: JCR Impact Factor 2018: 1.361, 5 Year Impact Factor: 1.323, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) 2017: 0.319, Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) 2017: 1.005, CiteScore 2017: 1.27, The Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education 2017: 25 points.

Abbreviations/Acronym: Journal citation: Bull. Pol. Ac.: Tech., ISO: Bull. Pol. Acad. Sci.-Tech. Sci., JCR Abbrev: B POL ACAD SCI-TECH Acronym in the Editorial System: BPASTS.

The objective of present work is to predict the thermal performance of wire screen porous bed solar air heater using artificial neural network (ANN) technique. This paper also describes the experimental study of porous bed solar air heaters (SAH). Analysis has been performed for two types of porous bed solar air heaters: unidirectional flow and cross flow. The actual experimental data for thermal efficiency of these solar air heaters have been used for developing ANN model and trained with Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) learning algorithm. For an optimal topology the number of neurons in hidden layer is found thirteen (LM-13).The actual experimental values of thermal efficiency of porous bed solar air heaters have been compared with the ANN predicted values. The value of coefficient of determination of proposed network is found as 0.9994 and 0.9964 for unidirectional flow and cross flow types of collector respectively at LM-13. For unidirectional flow SAH, the values of root mean square error, mean absolute error and mean relative percentage error are found to be 0.16359, 0.104235 and 0.24676 respectively, whereas, for cross flow SAH, these values are 0.27693, 0.03428, and 0.36213 respectively. It is concluded that the ANN can be used as an appropriate method for the prediction of thermal performance of porous bed solar air heaters.