• Advances in concrete construction
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.411-418
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• 2021

Roller compacted concrete (RCC) used in the island reef airport runway will be subjected to the coupling actions of the fatigue impacts and the salt spray cycles, which will accelerate the deterioration of runway concrete and even threaten the flight safety. A cyclic impact testing machine and a climatic chamber were used to simulate the low-velocity fatigue impact and the salt spray cycles, respectively. The physical properties, the microstructures and the porosity of RCC were investigated. The results show the flexural strength firstly increases and then decreases with the increase of the fatigue impacts and the salt spray cycles. However, the decrease in the flexural strength is significantly earlier than the compressive strength of RCC only subjected to the salt spray cycles. The chlorine, sulfur and magnesium elements significantly increase in the pores of RCC subjected to 30000 fatigue impacts and 300 salt spray cycles, which causes the decrease in the porosity of RCC. The coupling effects of the fatigue impacts and the salt spray cycles in the later period accelerates the deterioration of RCC.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.85 no.3
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• pp.315-335
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• 2023

Limited studies are available on the mathematical estimates of the compressive strength (CS) of glass fiber-embedded polymer (glass-FRP) compressive elements. The present study has endeavored to estimate the CS of glass-FRP normal strength concrete (NSTC) compression elements (glass-FRP-NSTC) employing two various methodologies; mathematical modeling and artificial neural networks (ANNs). The dataset of 288 glass-FRP-NSTC compression elements was constructed from the various testing investigations available in the literature. Diverse equations for CS of glass-FRP-NSTC compression elements suggested in the previous research studies were evaluated employing the constructed dataset to examine their correctness. A new mathematical equation for the CS of glass-FRP-NSTC compression elements was put forwarded employing the procedures of curve-fitting and general regression in MATLAB. The newly suggested ANN equation was calibrated for various hidden layers and neurons to secure the optimized estimates. The suggested equations reported a good correlation among themselves and presented precise estimates compared with the estimates of the equations available in the literature with R²= 0.769, and R² =0.9702 for the mathematical and ANN equations, respectively. The statistical comparison of diverse factors for the estimates of the projected equations also authenticated their high correctness for apprehending the CS of glass-FRP-NSTC compression elements. A broad parametric examination employing the projected ANN equation was also performed to examine the effect of diverse factors of the glass-FRP-NSTC compression elements.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.733-745
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• 2022

This study proposed a robust artificial intelligence (AI) model based on the social behaviour of the imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) and artificial neural network (ANN) for modelling the deflection of reinforced concrete beams, abbreviated as ICA-ANN model. Accordingly, the ICA was used to adjust and optimize the parameters of an ANN model (i.e., weights and biases) aiming to improve the accuracy of the ANN model in modelling the deflection reinforced concrete beams. A total of 120 experimental datasets of reinforced concrete beams were employed for this aim. Therein, applied load, tensile reinforcement strength and the reinforcement percentage were used to simulate the deflection of reinforced concrete beams. Besides, five other AI models, such as ANN, SVM (support vector machine), GLMNET (lasso and elastic-net regularized generalized linear models), CART (classification and regression tree) and KNN (k-nearest neighbours), were also used for the comprehensive assessment of the proposed model (i.e., ICA-ANN). The comparison of the derived results with the experimental findings demonstrates that among the developed models the ICA-ANN model is that can approximate the reinforced concrete beams deflection in a more reliable and robust manner.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.293-309
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• 2022

Accurate design models for predicting the shear resistance of headed studs in solid concrete slabs are essential for obtaining economical and safe steel-concrete composite structures. In this study, symbolic regression with genetic programming (GPSR) was applied to experimental data to formulate new descriptive equations for predicting the shear resistance of studs in solid slabs using both normal and lightweight concrete. The obtained GPSR-based nominal resistance equations demonstrated good agreement with the test results. The equations indicate that the stud shear resistance is insensitive to the secant modulus of elasticity of concrete, which has been included in many international standards following the pioneering work of Ollgaard et al. In contrast, it increases when the stud height-to-diameter ratio increases, which is not reflected by the design models in the current international standards. The nominal resistance equations were subsequently refined for use in design from reliability analyses to ensure that the target reliability index required by the Eurocodes was achieved. Resistance factors for the developed equations were also determined following US design practice. The stud shear resistance predicted by the proposed models was compared with the predictions from 13 existing models. The accuracy of the developed models exceeds the accuracy of the existing equations. The proposed models produce predictions that can be used with confidence in design, while providing significantly higher stud resistances for certain combinations of variables than those computed with the existing equations given by many standards.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.179-200
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• 2022

This paper proposes a data-driven methodology for online early damage identification under changing environmental conditions. The proposed method relies on two data analysis methods: feature-based method and hybrid principal component analysis (PCA) and kernel PCA to separate damage from environmental influences. First, spectral sub-band features, namely, spectral sub-band centroids (SSCs) and log spectral sub-band energies (LSSEs), are proposed as damage-sensitive features to extract damage information from measured structural responses. Second, hybrid modeling by integrating PCA and kernel PCA is performed on the spectral sub-band feature matrix for data normalization to extract both linear and nonlinear features for nonlinear procedure monitoring. After feature normalization, suppressing environmental effects, the control charts (Hotelling T² and SPE statistics) is implemented to novelty detection and distinguish damage in structures. The hybrid PCA-KPCA technique is compared to KPCA by applying support vector machine (SVM) to evaluate the effectiveness of its performance in detecting damage. The proposed method is verified through numerical and full-scale studies (a Bridge Health Monitoring (BHM) Benchmark Problem and a cable-stayed bridge in China). The results demonstrate that the proposed method can detect the structural damage accurately and reduce false alarms by suppressing the effects and interference of environmental variations.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.599-616
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• 2022

Bridge displacement contains vital information for bridge condition and performance. Due to the limits of direct displacement measurement methods, the indirect displacement reconstruction methods based on the strain or acceleration data are also developed in engineering applications. There are still some deficiencies of the displacement reconstruction methods based on strain or acceleration in practice. This paper proposed a novel method based on long short-term memory (LSTM) networks to reconstruct the bridge dynamic displacements with the strain and acceleration data source. The LSTM networks with three hidden layers are utilized to map the relationships between the measured responses and the bridge displacement. To achieve the data fusion, the input strain and acceleration data need to be preprocessed by normalization and then the corresponding dynamic displacement responses can be reconstructed by the LSTM networks. In the numerical simulation, the errors of the displacement reconstruction are below 9% for different load cases, and the proposed method is robust when the input strain and acceleration data contains additive noise. The hyper-parameter effect is analyzed and the displacement reconstruction accuracies of different machine learning methods are compared. For experimental verification, the errors are below 6% for the simply supported beam and continuous beam cases. Both the numerical and experimental results indicate that the proposed data fusion method can accurately reconstruct the displacement.

• Advances in materials Research
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.75-90
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• 2022

In this paper, functionality of soft computing algorithms such as Group method of data handling (GMDH), Random forest (RF), Random tree (RT), Linear regression (LR), M5P, and artificial neural network (ANN) have been looked out to predict the compressive strength of concrete mixed with marble powder. Assessment of result suggests that, the overall performance of ANN based model gives preferable results over the different applied algorithms for the estimate of compressive strength of concrete. The results of coefficient of correlation were maximum in ANN model (0.9139) accompanied through RT with coefficient of correlation (CC) value 0.8241 and minimum root mean square error (RMSE) value of ANN (4.5611) followed by RT with RMSE (5.4246). Similarly, other evaluating parameters like, Willmott's index and Nash-sutcliffe coefficient value of ANN was 0.9458 and 0.7502 followed by RT model (0.8763 and 0.6628). The end result showed that, for both subsets i.e., training and testing subset, ANN has the potential to estimate the compressive strength of concrete. Also, the results of sensitivity suggest that the water-cement ratio has a massive impact in estimating the compressive strength of concrete with marble powder with ANN based model in evaluation with the different parameters for this data set.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.361-374
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• 2022

As civil infrastructure has continued to age worldwide, its structural integrity has been threatened owing to material deteriorations and continual loadings from the external environment. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has emerged as a cost-efficient method for ensuring structural safety and durability. As SHM research has gradually addressed an increasing number of structure-related problems, it has become difficult to understand the changing research topic trends. Although previous review papers have analyzed research trends on specific SHM topics, these studies have faced challenges in providing (1) consistent insights regarding macroscopic SHM research trends, (2) empirical evidence for research topic changes in overall SHM fields, and (3) methodological validations for the insights. To overcome these challenges, this study proposes a framework tailored to capturing the trends of research topics in SHM through a bibliometric and network analysis. The framework is applied to track SHM research topics over 15 years by identifying both quantitative and relational changes in the author keywords provided from representative SHM journals. The results of this study confirm that overall SHM research has become diversified and multi-disciplinary. Especially, the rapidly growing research topics are tightly related to applying machine learning and computer vision techniques to solve SHM-related issues. In addition, the research topic network indicates that damage detection and vibration control have been both steadily and actively studied in SHM research.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.83 no.5
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• pp.671-680
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• 2022

The shear capacity of beams is an essential parameter in designing beams carrying shear loads. Precise estimation of the ultimate shear capacity typically requires comprehensive calculation methods. For steel fiber reinforced concrete (SFRC) beams, traditional design methods may not accurately predict the interaction between different parameters affecting ultimate shear capacity. In this study, artificial neural network (ANN) modeling was utilized to predict the ultimate shear capacity of SFRC beams using ten input parameters. The results demonstrated that the ANN with 30 neurons had the best performance based on the values of root mean square error (RMSE) and coefficient of determination (R²) compared to other ANN models with different neurons. Analysis of the ANN model has shown that the clear shear span to depth ratio significantly affects the predicted ultimate shear capacity, followed by the reinforcement steel tensile strength and steel fiber tensile strength. Moreover, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) was used to optimize the ANN model's input parameters, resulting in the least cost for the SFRC beams. Results have shown that SFRC beams' cost increased with the clear span to depth ratio. Increasing the clear span to depth ratio has increased the depth, height, steel, and fiber ratio needed to support the SFRC beams against shear failures. This study approach is considered among the earliest in the field of SFRC.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.433-444
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• 2022

Concrete's compressive strength is widely studied in order to understand many qualities and the grade of the concrete mixture. Conventional civil engineering tests involve time and resources consuming laboratory operations which results in the deterioration of concrete samples. Proposing efficient non-destructive models for the prediction of concrete compressive strength will certainly yield advancements in concrete studies. In this study, the efficiency of using radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) which is not common in this field, is studied for the concrete compressive strength prediction. Complementary studies with back propagation neural network (BPNN), which is commonly used in this field, have also been carried out in order to verify the efficiency of RBFNN for compressive strength prediction. A total of 13 input parameters, including novel ones such as cement's and fly ash's compositional information, have been employed in the prediction models with RBFNN and BPNN since all these parameters are known to influence concrete strength. Three different train: test ratios were tested with both models, while different hidden neurons, epochs, and spread values were introduced to determine the optimum parameters for yielding the best prediction results. Prediction results obtained by RBFNN are observed to yield satisfactory high correlation coefficients and satisfactory low mean square error values when compared to the results in the previous studies, indicating the efficiency of the proposed model.