PREDICTION OF LOAD DEFLECTION BEHAVIOUR OF TWO WAY RC SLAB USING NEURAL NETWORK APPROACH

Reinforced concrete (RC) slabs exhibit complexities in their structural behavior under load due to the composite nature of the material and the multitude and variety of factors that affect such behavior. Current methods for determining the load-deflection behavior of reinforced concrete slabs are limited in scope and are mostly dependable on the results of experimental tests. In this study, an alternative approach using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model is produced to predict the load-deflection behavior of a two-way RC slab. In the study, 30 sets of RC slab specimens of sizes 700mm x 600mm x 75mm were cast, cured for 28days using the sprinkling method of curing and tested for deflection experimentally by applying loads ranging from 10kN to 155kN at intervals of 5kN. ANN model was then developed using the neural network toolbox of ANN in MATLAB version R2015a using back propagation algorithm. About 54% of the RC specimens were used for the training of the network while 23% of the sets were used for validation leaving the remaining 23 % for testing the network. The experimental test results show that the higher the applied load on the slab, the higher the deflection. The result of the ANN model shows a good correlation between the experimental test and the predicted results with training, validation and test correlation coefficients of 0.99692, 0.98921 and 0.99611 respectively. It was also found that ANN model is quite efficient in determining the deflection of 2-way RC slab. The predicted accuracy of performance value for the load-deflection set falls at 96.67% of the experimental load-deflection with a 0.31% minimum error using the Microsoft spreadsheet model. As such the comprehensive spreadsheet tool created to incorporate the optimum neural network. The spreadsheet model uses the Microsoft version 2013 excel tool software and can be used by structural engineers for instantaneous access to the prediction if any aspect of a concrete slab behavior given minimal data to describe the slab and the loading condition.