Experimental and Probabilistic Investigations of the Effect of Fly Ash Dosage on Concrete Compressive Strength and Stress-strain Relationship

Abstract

The effect of fly ash (FA) dosage on concrete’s compressive strength and stress-strain relationship is investigated in two steps in this article. First, an experimental program was conducted on concrete mixtures designed with 0% (control batch of 30 MPa mean cylinder compressive strength), 10, 20, 30, and 40% of ordinary Portland cement (OPC) mass replaced by FA, which is taken from a new source in an Asia country. The test results showed that compared to other investigated dosages, concrete using 20% FA/OPC mass-replacement gained the most improvement in the 28-day compressive strength and tensile split strength, as well as the compressive strength development. Second, a probabilistic investigation was conducted using Dropout Neural Network, Bayesian Neural Network, and Gaussian Process models. These artificial intelligence-based models were compared to other models reviewed from the literature, showing relatively good results in terms of the statistical metric R2, which are 0.92, 0.9, and 0.88, respectively. The three models were tested and validated with a dataset of 1032 experimental results on FAC collected from the literature. When testing with the experimental results obtained in the first step, a good correlation between the predicted values and the experimental results was observed within the confidence interval of (5%, 95%), showing the reliability of the proposed models. Thus, the stress-strain relationship of fly ash concrete can also be investigated in a probabilistic manner. It is proved in this study that among the proposed models, Dropout Neural Network has the best balance between performance and time complexity.