Data-guided for discovering high-strength, cost-effective, and low-carbon rice husk ash concrete

Abstract

This study aims to present a data-guided intelligent design framework for discovering high-strength, cost-effective, and low-carbon rice husk ash concrete (RHC). First, gradient boosting (GB) models were developed to predict compressive strength of RHC based on a dataset with 1150 samples. The CatBoost model outperforms XGBoost and LightGBM models on the test set, and its determination of coefficient (R2), root mean squared error (RMSE), and mean absolute error (MAE) are 0.984, 3.270 MPa, and 2.290 MPa respectively. With the best prediction model, SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) was utilized to shed light on the model outputs. The curing age is the most dominant features effecting the compressive strength of RHC, and the next two are the contents of cement and water. Then, a computational design framework was proposed by integrating the machine learning-based model and the evolutionary algorithm. Considering compressive strength, materials cost, embodied carbon, and embodied energy, the multi-objective optimization was conducted leveraging the improved adaptive geometry estimation based many-objective evolutionary algorithm (AGE-MOEA II). The optimal solutions of the different design scenarios were achieved using the multi-criteria decision-making method. The research can provide a theoretical reference for the capability of developing RHC mixture using data-guided approachesto promote the sustainable development of concrete industry.