Prediction of compressive strength of bacteria incorporated geopolymer concrete by using ANN and MARS

Abstract

This paper examines the applicability of artificial neural network (ANN) and multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) to predict the compressive strength of bacteria incorporated geopolymer concrete (GPC). The mix is composed of new bacterial strain, manufactured sand, ground granulated blast furnace slag, silica fume, metakaolin and fly ash. The concentration of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) is maintained at 8 Molar, sodium silicate (Na2SiO3) to NaOH weight ratio is 2.33 and the alkaline liquid to binder ratio of 0.35 and ambient curing temperature (28oC) is maintained for all the mixtures. In ANN, back-propagation training technique was employed for updating the weights of each layer based on the error in the network output. Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm was used for feed-forward back-propagation. MARS model was developed by establishing a relationship between a set of predictors and dependent variables. MARS is based on a divide and conquers strategy partitioning the training data sets into separate regions; each gets its own regression line. Six models based on ANN and MARS were developed to predict the compressive strength of bacteria incorporated GPC for 1, 3, 7, 28, 56 and 90 days. About 70% of the total 84 data sets obtained from experiments were used for development of the models and remaining 30% data was utilized for testing. From the study, it is observed that the predicted values from the models are found to be in good agreement with the corresponding experimental values and the developed models are robust and reliable.