• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.433-444
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• 2022

Concrete is a most utilized material in the construction industry that have main components. The strength of concrete can be improved by adding some admixtures. Evaluating the impact of fly ash (FA) and silica fume (SF) on the long-term compressive strength (CS) of concrete provokes to find the significant parameters in predicting the CS, which could be useful in the practical works and would be extensible in the future analysis. In this study, to evaluate the effective parameters in predicting the CS of concrete containing admixtures in the long-term and present a fitted equation, the multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) method has been used, which could find a relationship between independent and dependent variables. Next, for optimizing the output equation, biogeography-based optimization (BBO), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and hybrid PSOBBO methods have been utilized to find the most optimal conclusions. It could be concluded that for CS predictions in the long-term, all proposed models have the coefficient of determination (R²) larger than 0.9243. Furthermore, MARS-PSOBBO could be offered as the best model to predict CS between three hybrid algorithms accurately.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.309-316
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• 2020

The application of multi-variable adaptive regression spline (MARS) in predicting he long-term compressive strength of a concrete with various admixtures has been investigated in this study. The compressive strength of concrete specimens, which were made based on 24 different mix designs using various mineral and chemical admixtures in different curing ages have been obtained. First, The values of fly ash (FA), micro-silica (MS), water-reducing admixture (WRA), coarse and fine aggregates, cement, water, age of samples and compressive strength were defined as inputs to the model, and MARS analysis was used to model the compressive strength of concrete and to evaluate the most important parameters affecting the estimation of compressive strength of the concrete. Next, the proposed equation by the MARS method using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm has been optimized to have more efficient equation from the economical point of view. The proposed model in this study predicted the compressive strength of the concrete with various admixtures with a correlation coefficient of R=0.958 rather than the measured compressive strengths within the laboratory. The final model reduced the production cost and provided compressive strength by reducing the WRA and increasing the FA and curing days, simultaneously. It was also found that due to the use of the liquid membrane-forming compounds (LMFC) for its lower cost than water spraying method (SWM) and also for the longer operating time of the LMFC having positive mechanical effects on the final concrete, the final product had lower cost and better mechanical properties.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.279-289
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• 2023

Brittleness index (BI) is an important property of rocks because it is a good index to predict rockburst. Due to its importance, several empirical and soft computing (SC) models have been proposed in the literature based on the punch penetration test (PPT) results. These models are very important as there is no clear-cut experimental means for measuring BI asides the PPT which is very costly and time consuming to perform. This study used a novel Multivariate Adaptive regression spline (MARS), M5P, and white-box ANN to predict the BI of rocks using the available data in the literature for an improved BI prediction. The rock density, uniaxial compressive strength (σ_c) and tensile strength (σ_t) were used as the input parameters into the models while the BI was the targeted output. The models were implemented in the MATLAB software. The results of the proposed models were compared with those from existing multilinear regression, linear and nonlinear particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) based models using similar datasets. The coefficient of determination (R²), adjusted R² (Adj R²), root-mean squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) were the indices used for the comparison. The outcomes of the comparison revealed that the proposed ANN and MARS models performed better than the other models with R² and Adj R² values above 0.9 and least error values while the M5P gave similar performance to those of the existing models. Weight partitioning method was also used to examine the percentage contribution of model predictors to the predicted BI and tensile strength was found to have the highest influence on the predicted BI.