Application of Artificial Intelligence Models to Predict the Tensile Strength of Glass Fiber-Modified Cemented Backfill Materials during the Mine Backfill Process

Abstract

Cemented backfill coal mining technology is gradually becoming a key technology for green mining of coal resources. And cemented backfill materials generally have congenital defects such as poor crack resistance, poor durability, and high brittleness, which restrict the promotion and application of cemented backfill coal mining technology. Due to the complex stress environment of in situ stress, mining stress, water pressure, and gas pressure, cemented backfill materials need to have good mechanical properties, and glass fiber is usually used to mix into cemented backfill materials to improve its performance, but there are many problems including complex testing process, high cost, and long time-consuming in the study of mechanical properties of glass fiber-modified cemented backfill materials (GFCBM) by laboratory tests. Consequently, this study proposed and compared four artificial intelligence models to forecast the tensile strength of GFCBM. Firstly, the laboratory tests of tensile properties of GFCBM under different influence factors were implemented to supply the prediction model with dataset. The input variables are aeolian sand content, cement content, glass fiber length, and glass fiber content, and the output variable is the tensile strength of GFCBM. The correlation coefficient ( $R$ ), mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean square error (RMSE) are selected to assess the estimated performance of the hybrid intelligent model. The results indicate that the four hybrid artificial intelligence models show a latent capacity for forecasting the tensile strength of GFCBM, and according to the order from high to low, the prediction ability of the four prediction models is as follows: ABC-SVM, GA-SVM, SSA-SVM, and DE-SVM, and the corresponding $R$ values are 0.9555, 0.9539, 0.9413, and 0.9359, respectively. The research findings are beneficial to promote the application of cemented backfill coal mining technology.