Estimating the compressive strength of HPFRC containingmetallic fibers using statistical methods and ANNs

Abstract

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.