Indirect measure of shear strength parameters of fiber-reinforced sandy soil using laboratory tests and intelligent systems

In this paper, practical predictive models for soil shear strength parameters are proposed. As cohesion and internal friction angle are of essential shear strength parameters in any geotechnical studies, we try to predict them via artificial neural network (ANN) and neuro-imperialism approaches. The proposed models was based on the result of a series of consolidated undrained triaxial tests were conducted on reinforced sandy soil. The experimental program surveys the increase in internal friction angle of sandy soil due to addition of polypropylene fibers with different lengths and percentages. According to the result of the experimental study, the most important parameters impact on internal friction angle i.e., fiber percentage, fiber length, deviator stress, and pore water pressure were selected as predictive model inputs. The inputs were used to construct several ANN and neuro-imperialism models and a series of statistical indices were calculated to evaluate the prediction accuracy of the developed models. Both simulation results and the values of computed indices confirm that the newly-proposed neuroimperialism model performs noticeably better comparing to the proposed ANN model. While neuro-imperialism model has training and test error values of 0.068 and 0.094, respectively, ANN model give error values of 0.083 for training sets and 0.26 for testing sets. Therefore, the neuro-imperialism can provide a new applicable model to effectively predict the internal friction angle of fiber-reinforced sandy soil.