Prediction of residual compressive strength of fly ash based concrete exposed to high temperature using GEP

The influence of material composition such as aggregate types, addition of supplementary cementitious materials as well as exposed temperature levels have significant impacts on concrete residual mechanical strength properties when exposed to elevated temperature. This study is based on data obtained from literature for fly ash blended concrete produced with natural and recycled concrete aggregates to efficiently develop prediction models for estimating its residual compressive strength after exposure to high temperatures. To achieve this, an extensive database that contains different mix proportions of fly ash blended concrete was gathered from published articles. The specific design variables considered were percentage replacement level of Recycled Concrete Aggregate (RCA) in the mix, fly ash content (FA), Water to Binder Ratio (W/B), and exposed Temperature level. Thereafter, a simplified mathematical equation for the prediction of concrete's residual compressive strength using Gene Expression Programming (GEP) was developed. The relative importance of each variable on the model outputs was also determined through global sensitivity analysis. The GEP model performance was validated using different statistical fitness formulas including R-2, MSE, RMSE, RAE, and MAE in which high R-2 values above 0.9 are obtained in both the training and validation phase. The low measured errors (e.g., mean square error and mean absolute error are in the range of 0.0160 - 0.0327 and 0.0912 - 0.1281 MPa, respectively) in the developed model also indicate high efficiency and accuracy of the model in predicting the residual compressive strength of fly ash blended concrete exposed to elevated temperatures.