NEURAL NETWORKS FOR THE PREDICTION OF FRESH PROPERTIES AND COMPRESSIVE STRENGTH OF FLOWABLE CONCRETE

Abstract

This paper presents the prediction of fresh concrete properties and compressive strength of flowable concrete through neural network approach. A comprehensive data set was generated from the experiments performed in the laboratory under standard conditions. The flowable concrete was made with two different types of micro particles and with single nano particles. The input parameter was chosen for the neural network model as cement, fine aggregate, coarse aggregate, superplasticizer, water-cement ratio, micro aluminium oxide particles, micro titanium oxide particles, and nano silica. The output parameter includes the slump Flow, L-Box flow, V Funnel flow and compressive strength of the flowable concrete. To develop a suitable neural network model, several training algorithms were used such as BFGS Quasi- Newton back propagation, Fletcher-Powell conjugate gradient back propagation, Polak - Ribiere conjugate gradient back propagation, Gradient descent with adaptive linear back propagation and Levenberg-Marquardt back propagation. It was found that BFGS Quasi- Newton back propagation and Levenberg-Marquardt back propagation algorithm provides more than 90% on the prediction accuracy. Hence, the model performance was agreeable for prediction purposes for the fresh properties and compressive strength of flowable concrete.