Modelling of the mechanical properties of concrete with cement ratio partially replaced by aluminium waste and sawdust ash using artificial neural network

Abstract

The use of aluminium waste (AW) and sawdust ash (SDA) in concrete was evaluated in this study where the cement ratio was partially replaced by fractions of AW and SDA introduced as a supplementary cementitious material. Artificial neural network (ANN) was adapted as the modelling tool for this study and was developed with a two-layer feed-forward network, hidden neurons with sigmoid activation function and linear output neurons for the simulation of the network. The setting time and concrete compressive strength at varying curing days were predicted using the neural network model with variations of constituents of the cement content consisting of OPC, SDA and AW as the input of the network. Three input and seven output data set were used for the model development using the following algorithms; Data Division: Random, Training: Levenberg–Marquardt and Calculation: MATLAB. The data sets are set aside for validation, training and testing; 70% of the samples are used for training, 15% for validation and 15% are also used for testing. The performance of the networks was evaluated using linear regression, RMSE and R-values. The model performance scored 0.91 and 0.07 for R ² and RMSE, respectively, and performed better than the linear regression model, the results indicate the efficiency, reliability and usefulness of ANN for predicting concrete mechanical properties where AW and SDA are used to replace cement ratio accurately.