Model-Based Adaptive Machine Learning Approach in Concrete Mix Design

Abstract

Concrete mix design is one of the most critical issues in concrete technology. This process aims to create a concrete mix which helps deliver concrete with desired features and quality. Contemporary requirements for concrete concern not only its structural properties, but also increasingly its production process and environmental friendliness, forcing concrete producers to use both chemically and technologically complex concrete mixtures. The concrete mix design methods currently used in engineering practice are joint analytical and laboratory procedures derived from the Three Equation Method and do not perform well enough for the needs of modern concrete technology. This often causes difficulties in predicting the final properties of the designed mix and leads to precautionary oversizing of concrete properties for fear of not providing the required parameters. A new approach that would make it possible to predict the newly designed concrete mix properties is highly desirable. The answer to this challenge can be methods based on machine learning, which have been intensively developed in recent years, especially in predicting concrete compressive strength. Machine learning-based methods have been more or less successful in predicting concrete compressive strength, but they do not reflect well the variability that characterises the currently used concrete mixes. A new adaptive solution that allows estimating concrete compressive strength on the basis of the concrete mix main ingredient composition by including two observations for a given batch of concrete is proposed herein. In presented study, a machine learning model was built with a deep neural network architecture, trained on an extensive database of concrete recipes, and translated into a mathematical formula. Testing on four concrete mix recipes was performed, which were calculated according to contemporary design methods (Bolomey and Fuller method), and a comparative analysis was conducted. It was found out that the new algorithm performs significantly better than that without adaptive features trained on the same dataset. The presented algorithm can be used as a concrete strength checking tool for the concrete mix design process.