Tensile strength prediction of corroded steel plates by using machine learning approach

Safety service improvement and development of efficient maintenance strategies for corroded steel structures are undeniably essential. Therefore, understanding the influence of damage caused by corrosion on the remaining load-carrying capacities such as tensile strength is required. In this study, artificial neural network (ANN) approach is proposed in order to produce a simple, accurate, and inexpensive method developed by using tensile test results, material properties and finite element method (FEM) results to train the ANN model. Initially in reproducing corroded model process, FEM was used to obtain tensile strength of artificial corroded plates, for which surface is developed by a spatial autocorrelation model. By using the corroded surface data and material properties as input data, with tensile strength as the output data, the ANN model could be trained. The accuracy of the ANN result was then verified by using leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV). As a result, it was confirmed that the accuracy of the ANN approach and the final output equation was developed for predicting tensile strength without tensile test results and FEM in further work. Though previous studies have been conducted, the accuracy results are still lower than the proposed ANN approach. Hence, the proposed ANN model now enables us to have a simple, rapid, and inexpensive method to predict residual tensile strength more accurately due to corrosion in steel structures.