Prediction of long-term strength of concrete based on artificial neural network

Recently, the safety of existing civil engineering structures, attracts more and more, attention. The long-term strength of concrete plays a key role during the assessment of safety and durability for civil engineering structures. The strength of concrete will gradually decrease during the service of civil engineering structures. It is significant to accurately predict the strength deterioration of concrete for correctly evaluating the safety of structures. The factors affecting the long-term strength of concrete include environment type, age, climate, water cement ratio, amount of cementing material and so on. In this paper, artificial neural network with powerful mapping ability has been selected to predict the long-term strength of concrete. First, there-layer BP neural network with age, water cement ratio, amount of cementing material as input and long-term strength as output was built. Then, the neural network was trained by the samples measured in real structures and the well-trained neural network was test. From the test results, the trained neural network can accurately predict the long-term strength of concrete with the error less then 9%.