Predicting compressive strength of blended cement concrete with ANNs

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Predicting the compressive strength of concrete is important to assess the load-carrying capacity of a structure. However, the use of blended cements to accrue the technical, economic and environmental benefits has increased the complexity of prediction models. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have been used for predicting the compressive strength of ordinary Portland cement concrete, i.e., concrete produced without the addition of supplementary cementing materials. In this study, models to predict the compressive strength of blended cement concrete prepared with a natural pozzolan were developed using regression models and single- and 2-phase learning ANNs. Back-propagation (BP), Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) and Conjugate Gradient Descent (CGD) methods were used for training the ANNs. A 2-phase learning algorithm is proposed for the first time in this study for predictive modeling of the compressive strength of blended cement concrete. The output of these predictive models indicates that the use of a 2-phase learning algorithm will provide better results than the linear regression model or the traditional single-phase ANN models.