Compressive Strength of Geopolymer Concrete Composites: Modeling and Comprehensive Systematic Review

Abstract

Abstract The growing concern about global climate change and its adverse impacts on societies is putting severe pressure on the construction industry as one of the largest producers of greenhouse gases. Given the environmental issues associated with cement production, geopolymer concrete has emerged as a sustainable construction material. Geopolymer concrete is cementless concrete that uses industrial or agro by-product ashes as the main binder instead of ordinary Portland cement; this leads to being an eco-efficient and environmentally friendly construction material. Compressive strength is one of the most important mechanical property for all types of concrete composites including geopolymer concrete, and it is affected by several parameters like an alkaline solution to binder ratio (l/b), fly ash (FA) content, SiO2/Al2O3 (Si/Al) of the FA, fine aggregate (F) and coarse aggregate (C) content, sodium hydroxide (SH) and sodium silicate (SS) content, ratio of sodium silicate to sodium hydroxide (SS/SH), molarity (M), curing temperature (T), curing duration (CD) inside the oven and specimen ages (A). In this regard, a comprehensive systematic review was carried out to show the effect of these different parameters on the compressive strength of the fly ash-based geopolymer concrete (FA-GPC). In addition, multi-scale models such as Artificial Neural Network (ANN), M5P-tree (M5P), Linear Regression (LR), and Multi-logistic Regression (MLR) models were developed to predict the compressive strength of FA-GPC composites. For the first time, in the modeling process, twelve effective parameters including l/b, FA, Si/Al, F, C, SH, SS, SS/SH, M, T, CD, and A were considered the modeling input parameters. Then, the efficiency of the developed models was assessed by various statistical assessment tools like Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Scatter Index (SI), OBJ value, and the Coefficient of determination (R2). Results show that the curing temperature, sodium silicate content, and ratio of the alkaline solution to the binder content are the most significant independent parameters that influence on the compressive strength of the FA-GPC, and the ANN model has better performance for predicting the compressive strength of FA-GPC in compared to the other developed models.