Development of Artificial Neural Networks for Predicting Concrete Compressive Strength

This research work focuses on development of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in prediction of compressive strength of concrete after 28 days. To predict the compressive strength of concrete six input parameters that are cement, water, silica fume, super plasticizer, fine aggregate and coarse aggregate are identified. A total of 639 different data sets of concrete was collected from the technical literature. Training data sets comprises 400 data entries, and the remaining data entries (239) are divided between the validation and testing sets. Different combinations of layers, number of neurons, activation functions, different values for learning rate and momentum were considered and the results were validated using an independent validation data set. A detailed study was carried out, considering two hidden layers for the architecture of neural network. The performance of the 6-12-6-1 architecture was the best possible architecture. The MSE for the training set was 5.33% for the 400 training data points, 6.13% for the 100 verification data points and 6.02 % for the 139 testing data points. The results of the present investigation indicate that ANNs have strong potential as a feasible tool for predicting the compressive strength of concrete.