• Computers and Concrete
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• 제27권5호
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• pp.489-512
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• 2021

In this study, two powerful techniques, namely particle swarm optimization (PSO) and imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) were selected and combined with a pre-developed ANN model aiming at improving its performance prediction of the compressive strength of concrete modified with fly ash. To achieve this study's aims, a comprehensive database with 379 data samples was collected from the available literature. The output of the database is the compressive strength (CS) of concrete samples, which are influenced by 9 parameters as model inputs, namely those related to mix composition. The modeling steps related to ICA-ANN (or neuro-imperialism) and PSO-ANN (or neuro-swarm) were conducted through the use of several parametric studies to design the most influential parameters on these hybrid models. A comparison of the CS values predicted by hybrid intelligence techniques with the experimental CS values confirmed that the neuro-swarm model could provide a higher degree of accuracy than another proposed hybrid model (i.e., neuro-imperialism). The train and test correlation coefficient values of (0.9042 and 0.9137) and (0.8383 and 0.8777) for neuro-swarm and neuro-imperialism models, respectively revealed that although both techniques are capable enough in prediction tasks, the developed neuro-swarm model can be considered as a better alternative technique in mapping the concrete strength behavior.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제68권6호
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• pp.691-700
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• 2018

Ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBS) is a by product obtained from iron and steel industries, useful in the design and development of high quality cement paste/mortar and concrete. This paper investigates the applicability of relevance vector machine (RVM) based regression model to predict the compressive strength of various GGBS based concrete mixes. Compressive strength data for various GGBS based concrete mixes has been obtained by considering the effect of water binder ratio and steel fibres. RVM is a machine learning technique which employs Bayesian inference to obtain parsimonious solutions for regression and classification. The RVM is an extension of support vector machine which couples probabilistic classification and regression. RVM is established based on a Bayesian formulation of a linear model with an appropriate prior that results in a sparse representation. Compressive strength model has been developed by using MATLAB software for training and prediction. About 70% of the data has been used for development of RVM model and 30% of the data is used for validation. The predicted compressive strength for GGBS based concrete mixes is found to be in very good agreement with those of the corresponding experimental observations.

• Computers and Concrete
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• 제6권2호
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• pp.155-165
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• 2009

Splitting tensile strength (STS) of high-performance concrete (HPC) is one of the important mechanical properties for structural design. This property is related to compressive strength (CS), water/binder (W/B) ratio and concrete age. This paper presents a clustering-based fuzzy model for the prediction of STS based on the CS and (W/B) at a fixed age (28 days). The data driven fuzzy model consists of three main steps: fuzzy clustering, inference system, and prediction. The system can be analyzed directly by the model from measured data. The performance evaluations showed that the fuzzy model is more accurate than the other prediction models concerned.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제45권6호
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• pp.837-851
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• 2013

In construction industry, strength is a primary criterion in selecting a concrete for a particular application. The concrete used for construction gains strength over a long period of time after pouring the concrete. The characteristic strength of concrete is defined as the compressive strength of a sample that has been aged for 28 days. Neither waiting for 28 days for such a test would serve the rapidity of construction, nor would neglecting it serve the quality control process on concrete in large construction sites. Therefore, rapid and reliable prediction of the strength of concrete would be of great significance. On this backdrop, the method is proposed to establish a predictive relationship between properties and proportions of ingredients of concrete, compaction factor, weight of concrete cubes and strength of concrete whereby the strength of concrete can be predicted at early age. Multiple regression analysis was carried out for predicting the compressive strength of concrete containing Portland Pozolana cement using statistical analysis for the concrete data obtained from the experimental work done in this study. The multiple linear regression models yielded fairly good correlation coefficient for the prediction of compressive strength for 7, 28 and 40 days curing. The results indicate that the proposed regression models are effectively capable of evaluating the compressive strength of the concrete containing Portaland Pozolana Cement. The derived formulas are very simple, straightforward and provide an effective analysis tool accessible to practicing engineers.

• Coupled systems mechanics
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• 제12권6호
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• pp.539-555
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• 2023

Although some prediction models have successfully developed for ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC), they do not provide insights and explicit relations between all constituents and its consistency, and compressive strength. In the present study, based on the experimental results, several mathematical models have been evaluated to predict the consistency and the 28-day compressive strength of UHPC. The models used were Linear, Logarithmic, Inverse, Power, Compound, Quadratic, Cubic, Mixed, Sinusoidal and Cosine equations. The applicability and accuracy of these models were investigated using experimental data, which were collected from literature. The comparisons between the models and the experimental results confirm that the majority of models give acceptable prediction with a high accuracy and trivial error rates, except Linear, Mixed, Sinusoidal and Cosine equations. The assessment of the models using numerical methods revealed that the Quadratic and Inverse equations based models provide the highest predictability of the compressive strength at 28 days and consistency, respectively. Hence, they can be used as a reliable tool in mixture design of the UHPC.

• Computers and Concrete
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• 제21권6호
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• pp.697-703
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• 2018

Compressive strength is one of the most important engineering properties of concrete, and testing of the compressive strength of concrete specimens is often costly and time consuming. In order to provide the time for concrete form removal, re-shoring to slab, project scheduling and quality control, it is necessary to predict the concrete strength based upon the early strength data. However, concrete compressive strength is affected by many factors, such as quality of raw materials, water cement ratio, ratio of fine aggregate to coarse aggregate, age of concrete, compaction of concrete, temperature, relative humidity and curing of concrete. The concrete compressive strength is a quite nonlinear function that changes depend on the materials used in the concrete and the time. This paper presents an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) for the prediction of concrete compressive strength. The training of fuzzy system was performed by a hybrid method of gradient descent method and least squares algorithm, and the subtractive clustering algorithm (SCA) was utilized for optimizing the number of fuzzy rules. Experimental data on concrete compressive strength in the literature were used to validate and evaluate the performance of the proposed ANFIS model. Further, predictions from three models (the back propagation neural network model, the statistics model, and the ANFIS model) were compared with the experimental data. The results show that the proposed ANFIS model is a feasible, efficient, and accurate tool for predicting the concrete compressive strength.

• Computers and Concrete
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• 제33권1호
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• pp.55-75
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• 2024

The present study introduces an optimum performance soft computing model for predicting the compressive strength of high-performance concrete (HPC) by comparing models based on conventional (kernel-based, covariance function-based, and tree-based), advanced machine (least square support vector machine-LSSVM and minimax probability machine regressor-MPMR), and deep (artificial neural network-ANN) learning approaches using a common database for the first time. A compressive strength database, having results of 1030 concrete samples, has been compiled from the literature and preprocessed. For the purpose of training, testing, and validation of soft computing models, 803, 101, and 101 data points have been selected arbitrarily from preprocessed data points, i.e., 1005. Thirteen performance metrics, including three new metrics, i.e., a20-index, index of agreement, and index of scatter, have been implemented for each model. The performance comparison reveals that the SVM (kernel-based), ET (tree-based), MPMR (advanced), and ANN (deep) models have achieved higher performance in predicting the compressive strength of HPC. From the overall analysis of performance, accuracy, Taylor plot, accuracy metric, regression error characteristics curve, Anderson-Darling, Wilcoxon, Uncertainty, and reliability, it has been observed that model CS4 based on the ensemble tree has been recognized as an optimum performance model with higher performance, i.e., a correlation coefficient of 0.9352, root mean square error of 5.76 MPa, and mean absolute error of 4.1069 MPa. The present study also reveals that multicollinearity affects the prediction accuracy of Gaussian process regression, decision tree, multilinear regression, and adaptive boosting regressor models, novel research in compressive strength prediction of HPC. The cosine sensitivity analysis reveals that the prediction of compressive strength of HPC is highly affected by cement content, fine aggregate, coarse aggregate, and water content.

• Computers and Concrete
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• 제32권6호
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• pp.577-594
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• 2023

Engineered cementitious composites with calcined clay limestone cement (LC³-ECC) as a kind of green, low-carbon and high toughness concrete, has recently received significant investigation. However, the complicated relationship between potential influential factors and LC³-ECC compressive strength makes the prediction of LC³-ECC compressive strength difficult. Regarding this, the machine learning-based prediction models for the compressive strength of LC³-ECC concrete is firstly proposed and developed. Models combine three novel meta-heuristic algorithms (golden jackal optimization algorithm, butterfly optimization algorithm and whale optimization algorithm) with support vector regression (SVR) to improve the accuracy of prediction. A new dataset about LC³-ECC compressive strength was integrated based on 156 data from previous studies and used to develop the SVR-based models. Thirteen potential factors affecting the compressive strength of LC³-ECC were comprehensively considered in the model. The results show all hybrid SVR prediction models can reach the Coefficient of determination (R²) above 0.95 for the testing set and 0.97 for the training set. Radar and Taylor plots also show better overall prediction performance of the hybrid SVR models than several traditional machine learning techniques, which confirms the superiority of the three proposed methods. The successful development of this predictive model can provide scientific guidance for LC³-ECC materials and further apply to such low-carbon, sustainable cement-based materials.

• Advances in concrete construction
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• 제10권6호
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• pp.479-488
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• 2020

The experimental and numerical works were carried out on high performance fiber reinforced concrete (HPFRC) with w/cm ratios ranging from 0.25 to 0.40, fiber volume fraction (Vf)=0-1.5% and 10% silica fume replacement. Improvements in compressive and flexural strengths obtained for HPFRC are moderate and significant, respectively, Empirical equations developed for the compressive strength and flexural strength of HPFRC as a function of fiber volume fraction. A relation between flexural strength and compressive strength of HPFRC with R=0.78 was developed. Due to the complex mix proportions and non-linear relationship between the mix proportions and properties, models with reliable predictive capabilities are not developed and also research on HPFRC was empirical. In this paper due to the inadequacy of present method, a back propagation-neural network (BP-NN) was employed to estimate the 28-day compressive strength of HPFRC mixes. BP-NN model was built to implement the highly non-linear relationship between the mix proportions and their properties. This paper describes the data sets collected, training of ANNs and comparison of the experimental results obtained for various mixtures. On statistical analyses of collected data, a multiple linear regression (MLR) model with R2=0.78 was developed for the prediction of compressive strength of HPFRC mixes, and average absolute error (AAE) obtained is 6.5%. On validation of the data sets by NNs, the error range was within 2% of the actual values. ANN model has given the significant degree of accuracy and reliability compared to the MLR model. ANN approach can be effectively used to estimate the 28-day compressive strength of fibrous concrete mixes and is practical.

• Computers and Concrete
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• 제5권5호
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• pp.461-473
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• 2008

The paper explores the potential of Support Vector Machines (SVM) approach in predicting 28-day compressive strength and slump flow of self-compacting concrete. Total of 80 data collected from the exiting literature were used in present work. To compare the performance of the technique, prediction was also done using a back propagation neural network model. For this data-set, RBF kernel worked well in comparison to polynomial kernel based support vector machines and provide a root mean square error of 4.688 (MPa) (correlation coefficient=0.942) for 28-day compressive strength prediction and a root mean square error of 7.825 cm (correlation coefficient=0.931) for slump flow. Results obtained for RMSE and correlation coefficient suggested a comparable performance by Support Vector Machine approach to neural network approach for both 28-day compressive strength and slump flow prediction.