High Performance Concrete Mixture Design using Artificial Neural Networks

신경망을 이용한 고성능 콘크리트의 배합설계

Concrete is one of the essential structural materials in the construction. But, concrete consists of many materials and is affected by many factors such as properties of materials, site environmental situations, and skill of constructor. Therefore, concrete mixes depend on experiences of experts. However, it is more and more difficult to determine concrete mixes design by empirical means because more ingredients like mineral and chemical admixtures are included. Artificial Neural Networks(ANN) are a mimic models of human brain to solve a complex nonlinear problem. They are powerful pattern recognizers and classifiers, also their computing abilities have been proven in the fields of prediction, estimation and pattern recognition. Here, among them, the back propagation network and radial basis function network are used. Compositions of high-performance concrete mixes are eight components(water, cement, fine aggregate, coarse aggregate, fly ash, silica fume, superplasticizer and air-entrainer). Compressive strength and slump are measured. The results show that neural networks are proper tools to minimize the uncertainties of the design of concrete mixtures.