Estimating Concrete Workability Based on Slump Test with Least Squares Support Vector Regression

Nhat-Duc Hoang,Anh-Duc Pham

doi:10.1155/2016/5089683

Abstract

Concrete workability, quantified by concrete slump, is an important property of a concrete mixture. Concrete slump is generally known to affect the consistency, flowability, pumpability, compactibility, and harshness of a concrete mix. Hence, an accurate prediction of this property is a practical need of construction engineers. This research proposes a machine learning model for predicting concrete slump based on the Least Squares Support Vector Regression (LS-SVR). LS-SVR is employed to model the nonlinear mapping between the mix components and slump values. Since the learning process of the LS-SVR necessitates two hyperparameters, the regularization and the kernel parameters, the grid search method is employed search for the most desirable set of hyperparameters. Furthermore, to construct the hybrid model, this research collected a dataset including actual concrete slump tests from a hydroelectric dam construction project in Vietnam. Experimental results show that the proposed model is capable of predicting concrete slump accurately.

Highlights

Concrete workability is defined as the effort required to manipulate a freshly mixed quantity of concrete with minimum loss of homogeneity [1]
The motivation for using these benchmark approaches is that the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is an effective tool for nonlinear modeling and has been successfully employed for predicting concrete slump [3, 12, 23]
This study has established a new method for predicting concrete workability quantified by the slump values

Summary

Introduction

Concrete workability is defined as the effort required to manipulate a freshly mixed quantity of concrete with minimum loss of homogeneity [1]. This property of concrete is generally known to affect the consistency, flowability, pumpability, compactibility, and harshness of a concrete mix. The slump test is the most common method for assessing the flow properties of fresh concrete; the slump provides a measure of workability [5]. Using this test, the slump can be derived by measuring the drop from the top of the slumped fresh concrete. As the complexity of concrete construction escalates, there is an increasing pressure on material engineers to achieve high workability as well as to maintain the necessary mechanical properties to meet design specifications

Objectives

Results

Conclusion