Compressive Strength Prediction of Self-Compacting Concrete Incorporating Silica Fume Using Artificial Intelligence Methods

Valiollah Azizifar,Milad Babajanzadeh

doi:10.28991/cej-0309193

Abstract

This paper investigates the capability of utilizing Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS) and Gene Expression Programing (GEP) methods to estimate the compressive strength of self-compacting concrete (SCC) incorporating Silica Fume (SF) as a supplementary cementitious materials. In this regards, a large experimental test database was assembled from several published literature, and it was applied to train and test the two models proposed in this paper using the mentioned artificial intelligence techniques. The data used in the proposed models are arranged in a format of seven input parameters including water, cement, fine aggregate, specimen age, coarse aggregate, silica fume, super-plasticizer and one output. To indicate the usefulness of the proposed techniques statistical criteria are checked out. The results testing datasets are compared to experimental results and their comparisons demonstrate that the MARS (R2=0.98 and RMSE= 3.659) and GEP (R2=0.83 and RMSE= 10.362) approaches have a strong potential to predict compressive strength of SCC incorporating silica fume with great precision. Performed sensitivity analysis to assign effective parameters on compressive strength indicates that age of specimen is the most effective variable in the mixture.

Highlights

Concrete as one of the important construction materials has been commonly applied around the world
Results of the analysis demonstrated that AS is the most effective parameter on the compressive strength of self-compacting concrete (SCC) containing silica fume and W has the least influence on the CS
This study evaluated the feasibility of utilizing Gene Expression Programing (GEP) and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS) models to estimate 28 days compressive strength of SCC containing metakaolin

Summary

Introduction

Concrete as one of the important construction materials has been commonly applied around the world. Among various trends and developments in building industry, the introduction of self-compacting concrete (SCC) represents acceptable potential and attracted interest to exploit the alternative raw materials, wastes, byproducts and secondary materials as mineral additives. It is commonly characterized as a special concrete which has desirable fluid features such as increasing flow capability, good segregation resistance and settling by its own weight even at the existence of congested reinforcement at deep and narrow element sections of non-conventional geometry. SCC has ability of consolidating itself without using the external and internal vibration during the placing processes It avoids bleeding and segregation and maintains its stability at the same time [1, 2]

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Results

Conclusion