Construction and Building Materials 40 (2013) 12001206

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Construction and Building Materials

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/conbuildmat

Prediction of compressive strength of recycled aggregate concrete using articial neural networks
Z.H. Duan, S.C. Kou, C.S. Poon
Department of Civil and Structural Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

h i g h l i g h t s
" Maximum size, absorption and

g r a p h i c a l a b s t r a c t
The proposed 14-16-1 ANNs model was constructed, and performed under the MATLAB program. Training, testing and validation of the model stages were performed using 168 sets of available test data based on many different concrete mix-designs used. The predicted results were compared with the experimentally determined results.

density of aggregates can reect the quality of RA. " ANN has a fairly high accuracy on predicting the strength of RAC. " The performance of ANN model may be improved with more parameters considered.

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
Recycled aggregates are substantially different in composition and properties compared with natural aggregates, leading it hard to predict the performance of recycled aggregate concrete and design their mix proportions. This paper aims to show the possible applicability of articial neural networks (ANNs) to predict the compressive strength of recycled aggregate concrete. ANN model is constructed, trained and tested using 146 available sets of data obtained from 16 different published literature sources. The ANN model developed used 14 input parameters that included: the mass of water, cement, sand, natural coarse aggregate, recycled coarse aggregate used in the mix designs, water to cement ratio of concrete, neness modulus of sand, water absorption of the aggregates, saturated surface-dried (SSD) density, maximum size, and impurity content of recycled coarse aggregate, the replacement ratio of recycled coarse aggregate by volume, and the coefcient of different concrete specimen. The ANN model, run in a Matlab platform, was used to predict the compressive strength of the recycled aggregate concrete. The results show that ANN has good potential to be used as a tool for predicting the compressive strength of recycled aggregate concrete prepared with varying types and sources of recycled aggregates. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Available online 22 June 2012 Keywords: Recycled aggregate Concrete Articial neural networks Compressive strength

Corresponding author. Tel.: +852 2766 6024; fax: +852 2334 6389.
E-mail address: cecspoon@polyu.edu.hk (C.S. Poon). 0950-0618/$ - see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2012.04.063

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Nomenclature W C S NA RA DCA SSD W/C FM Wm KCA d rv water ordinary Portland cement sand natural aggregate recycled aggregate maximum size of coarse aggregate saturated surface dry specic gravity of coarse aggregate watercement ratio neness modulus of sand water absorption of coarse aggregate type of coarse aggregate impurity content replacement ratio by volume CF fcu NAC RAC ANNs R2 RMSE MAPE A P Abs n BPNs conversion coefcient 28-day compressive strength natural aggregate concrete recycled aggregate concrete articial neural networks absolute fraction of variance root mean square error mean absolute percentage error actual value predicted value absolute error relative error back-propagation networks

1. Introduction Along with the rapid urban development and economic activities, the generation of construction and demolition (C&D) waste has increased substantially in many parts of the world, in particular in China. In Hong Kong, it has been estimated that the annual generation of C&D waste could be as much as 14 million tons [1,2]. If not managed properly reasonably, such a huge amount of waste will bring signicant environmental problem. Since the landll sites in Hong Kong will be saturated in about 8 years time, it is important to nd a viable way to reuse these waste materials. At the same time, there is critical shortage of natural aggregates in Hong Kong for the production of new concrete. The concrete industry globally consumed 812 billion tons annually of natural aggregates [3], among them about 4 billion tons were consumed in China. The extraction of natural aggregates, such as crushed rock and river sand have signicant impact on the environment. Therefore, the concrete industry is exploring ways to utilize C&D waste for concrete production in order to achieve sustainable development. Over the last two decades, many investigators have made use of various methods to predict the properties of concrete prepared by different mix proportions. Among these methods, Methods based on Articial Neural Networks (ANNs) are quite popular. This is mainly due to the obvious advantages of ANN: (1) easy to use, because ANN has the ability to learn directly from examples, i.e. the relationships between input and output variables are generated by the data themselves. (2) High accuracy, ANN can tolerate relatively imprecise or incomplete tasks, approximate results, and even less vulnerable to outliers [4]. Due to the above mentioned features, the ANN techniques have been adopted by some researchers to predict the performance of concrete [515]. However, currently ANN are mainly used in concrete made only with natural aggregates, and is rarely adopted in the concrete containing recycled aggregates because of their complex composition of recycled aggregates, although Topu and Sardemir [16] made a trial on predicting the compressive and splitting tensile strengths of recycled aggregate concretes containing silica fume. The aim of this paper is to report the results of a study to evaluate whether or not the compressive strength of concrete made with different types and sources of recycled aggregates can be predicted by ANN. The ANN model with one hidden layer was constructed, and performed under the MATLAB program. Training, testing and validation of the model stages were performed using 168 sets of available test data based on many different concrete mix-designs used. The constructed ANN model had 14 input

parameters and one output parameter. The predicted results were compared with the experimentally determined results. 2. Recycled aggregate The most signicant difference between natural aggregates (NAs) and recycled aggregates (RAs) is that RA usually contains a large amount of attached mortar and old cement paste, which account for about 2030% of the total volume. This is normally related to the properties of the original concrete from which the RA is derived and the production process of the RA. More angular in shape, lower bulk and SSD specic densities, higher water absorption, inferior strength, presence of contaminants (e.g. ceramic) and lower resistance to mechanical and chemical actions are the primary features of RA when compared with NA [2,17,18]. Parameters like specic density, water absorption, porosity, percentage of elongated particles, neness modulus, strength indices (10% nes value, crushing value, impact value, and Los Angeles abrasion) and impurity content are often adopted to evaluate the properties of the RA. But the indices used in different countries or regions usually are not the same. The properties of concrete made with RA are often inferior to those concrete made with only NA due principally to the high water absorption and low density of RA. Normally, in using recycled aggregates for making new concrete, only the coarse aggregates are used. This is due to recycled ne aggregates normally have very high water absorption values rendering them not suitable for making new concrete [19] as it would lead to excessive drying shrinkage. So this paper only discusses the use of recycled coarse aggregate in new concrete. Limbachiya et al. [20] noted that the strength of recycled aggregate concrete (RAC) has little difference, if the replacement ratio of NA by RA is no higher than 30%, to that of conventional concrete, and they also reported a gradual reduction of strength with the increase of the replacement ratio. Rahal [21] indicted that the 28day cube and cylinder compressive strength of RAC was about 10% lower than that of natural aggregate concrete prepared with similar mix proportions. They also showed the development trends of compressive, shear strength and the strain at peak stress of RAC were similar to those of natural aggregate concrete (NAC). Eguchi et al. [22] pointed out that the performance of RAC was weaker with the increase of the substitute ratio of RA, indicated that the poor performance could be compensated through estimating the decrease in quality by the relative quality values and adjusting the replacement ratio. Poon et al. [23] also pointed out that the compressive strength of concrete made with RA was inferior to that of NA, and they also reported a trend that the strength

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development of the RAC prepared with RA from high performance concrete (HPC) was faster than that from normal concrete (NC). They attributed the results to the differences in porosity and pore structure of the two types of RAs, and possible interactions between the RAs and the cement paste, since the physical properties and bond strength of RA made from HPC were better than those from NC. Ajdukiewicz and Kliszewicz [24] compared the properties of RAC made with different RA replacement ratios, watercement ratios and RAs with different strengths (high, medium or low strength) and in different moisture conditions. They concluded that the strength of RAC was about 1025% lower than that of NAC. They also concluded that the compressive or tensile strength loss of RAC prepared with low strength RA was more signicant than that of concrete prepared with high strength RA, and the extent of the reduction was related to many parameters, such as the type of concrete used for making the RA (high, medium or low strength), replacement ratios, water-cement ratios and the moisture conditions of the RA. Limbachiya et al. [25] reported that the strength of RAC showed little difference at a given RA content for RA samples obtained from four different sources, indicating no signicant effect if adequate provisions for RA characteristics were made. The RAC mixes were found to own bulk engineering and durability properties similar to the corresponding NAC, providing they were designed to have equal strength. It can be seen from the above literatures that the mechanical properties of RAC are in general inferior to those of NAC, mainly because of the presence of old cement paste. To maintain the same workability without the use of chemical admixtures, RAC requires more water to maintain uidity than conventional concrete, which affects the quality and strength of the concrete, resulting in lower concrete strength [26]. It is generally agreed that the strength and other properties of RA can be as good as that of NA if the attached cement mortar can be removed. A lot of effort have been made to study the inuence of the attached cement mortar on the properties of RA, including methods to measure the amount of attached mortar content, and the ways to remove the mortar, Marta and Gutirrez [17] found that the attached mortar content was inversely proportional to the size of the RA, and the higher amount attached mortar would lead to lower density, and the trends were similar for values of water absorption, Los Angeles abrasion and sulphate content of the RA. RA can be regarded as a composite of virgin aggregates and old cement pastes and is different from natural aggregates. The current empirical methods presented in the standards and codes for predicting the strength and estimating mechanical properties are based on tests of conventional concrete without RA and are not applicable for RAC. Abbas et al. [27] proposed a new method called the equivalent mortar volume (EMV) method. When designing a concrete mix proportion containing RA, they proposed to account for the relative amount and properties of the two components and adjust both the natural coarse aggregate and new paste content of the mix accordingly. The results of the test showed that RAC mixes proportioned by the EMV method satised the current requirements for concrete exposed to severe environments. But it is not feasible in practice to calculate the volume of attached mortar as the RA produced from the waste recycling plants are seldom derived from a single source. As a result, RA is still not widely used in concrete construction.

Fig. 1. A simple neuron model.

networks [28]. Though sometimes seems quite simple and small in size, ANN can exhibit amazing capability in modeling the human brain. An ANN model (shown in Fig. 1 [29,30]) consists of a number of interconnected group of articial neurons, each of which is fully connected to the other through connection weights and receives an input signal from neurons linked to it. These weights, present the effect of an input parameter in the previous layer on the process element, can be adjusted to produce an output needed. Information is transmitted to the output layer from the input layer in one direction, along with which learning process is conducted to minimize the deviation between the actual values and output values. In most cases an ANN is an adaptive system that can change its model according to relevant information that ows through the network during the learning phase. ANN can be used to model nearly any complex relationships between inputs and outputs in data. 3.2. Back-propagation ANNs Among various ANN architectures, the back-propagation network (BPN) is one of the simple and most applicable networks being used in modeling the performances of concrete, mainly due to it can adjust the weights of each layer based on the errors present at the network output. A typical structure of BPN model consists of an input layer, one or more hidden layers and an output layer, and each layer consists of numerous neurons. The neural network based modeling process involves ve main aspects: (1) data acquisition, analysis and problem representation; (2) architecture determination; (3) learning process determination; (4) training of the networks; and (5) testing of the trained network for generalization evaluation [31]. More details regarding construction of ANN can be found in the quoted Refs. [6,15,16,32 39]. The training set of BPN contains two stages, one is feed-forward stage and the other is back-propagation stage. In the former stage, the input layer neurons pass the input mode onto the hidden layer. Each of the hidden layer neurons computes a weighted sum of its input, and passes the sum through its activation function and presents the activation value to the output layer. Following the computation of a weighted sum of each neuron in the output layer, the sum is passed through its activation function, resulting in one output value for the network. Usually, a sigmoidal function (f ()) is used. The output is calculated according to the following equation:

fj
3. Articial neural networks 3.1. Background ANN is a mathematical or computational model that tries to simulate the structure or functional aspects of biological neural

1 P 1 exp wji oi b

where wji is the connection weight from the neuron i in the lower layer to neuron j in the upper layer and an initially small random value, oi is the output of the neuron i, and b is the bias value. The error of network is passed backwards from the output layer to the input layer, and the weights are adjusted based on some

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learning strategies so as to reduce the network error to an acceptable level. In this study, the error arose during the training and testing in ANN and FL models can be expressed as a rootmean-squared error (RMSE) and is calculated using Eq. (2) according to Pala et al. [10] and ztas et al. [31], the absolute fraction of variance (R2) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) are computed by Eqs. (3) and (4), respectively.

4. Experimental program 4.1. Selection of input parameters In total, 14 input parameters were used to construct the ANN model used in this study. These include:

RMSE

s   X 1 ktj oj k2 p j

4.1.1. Concrete constitutes The amount of components in a concrete mix, such as the amount of water, cement, sand, natural and recycled aggregates, are the main factors affecting the concrete strength.

1 0X t j oj 2 C B J C R2 1 B A @ X 2 oj
j

MAPE

  ot 100 o

4.1.2. Nature of aggregates The neness modulus of sand, overlooked in many studies, is also an important factor, can directly inuence the workability, strength, impermeability and other properties. In addition, the quality of coarse aggregates, such as maximum particle size, SSD specic gravity and water absorption values, is another factor that affects the RAC strength greatly [25]. As the sources and crushing processes from which the RA was obtained in this paper were quite different, the properties of the coarse aggregates used varied greatly. The SSD specic density and water absorption of the mixed coarse aggregate (natural + recycled) were calculated by the following Eqs. (5)(7).

where t and o are the predicted and actual output of the network, respectively, and p is the total number of training and testing patterns.

MRA =SSDRA 100 M RA =SSDRA M NA =SSDNA SSDRA r SSDNA 100 r 100 WaRA r WaNA 100 r 100

SSDCA

Table 1 The input and output parameters and quantities used in models. Input parameters Data used in training and testing the models Minimum W (kg/m3) C (kg/m3) S (kg/m3) NA (kg/m3) RA (kg/m3) FM DCA (mm) W/C KCA d (%) Wm (%) SSD (g/cm3) rv (%) CF Output value (MPa) 28d fcu 147.1 220 590 0 0 2.11 12 0.32 1 0 0.14 2.27 0 0.95 15 Maximum 271 672 1027 1237 1171 5.81 25 0.7 6 8 9.25 2.86 100 1.25 70.1

WaCA

where r (%) is the volume fraction of coarse RA in RAC; MRA and MNA (kg/m3) are the quantities of coarse RA and NA used in RAC, respectively; SSDCA, SSDNA and SSDRA (g/cm3) are saturated surface dry specic density of total coarse aggregates, natural coarse aggregates and recycled coarse aggregates, respectively; WaCA, WaNA and WaRA (%) are water absorption of total coarse aggregates, natural coarse aggregates and recycled coarse aggregates, respectively. As the strength of aggregate is much higher than the strength of cement paste, so for low to medium strength concrete considered in this study, the strength of concrete is only slightly affected by the strength of the aggregates. So in this paper, the strength index of the aggregates is not considered. Also, most of the published work did not have information on strength data (crushing value or 10-percent ne value).of the aggregates used in the concrete mixes. The impurities in RA can signicantly affect the performance of RAC. Generally speaking, RA, produced from old concrete test cubes or cylinders, are 100% concrete, while RA obtained from old buildings or old pavements contain small amounts of soft soils, natural stones, clay bricks, and other impurities like paper, wood, glass, tiles and metals [40]. As the contents of impurities in RA generated from different sources are different, they should be considered when preparing RAC. Table 1 shows the list of input parameter used in this study.

Table 2 Details of data and their sources. No. 12 8 4 5 4 7 12 3 8 4 3 24 39 5 10 12 16 C (kg) 220290 286; 404 380 400 325; 345 350 353 379 250450 312; 368 475672 300400 275462.5 410 279.4335.8 390; 450 400; 410 W/C 0.4; 0.7 0.5; 0.7 0.5 0.52 0.55 0.5 0.590.68 0.5 0.350.6 0.47 0.320.4 0.40.65 0.40.6 0.55 0.450.7 0.35; 0.5 0.40.55 FM 2.63 3.28 2.85 3.3 5.81 2.63 2.11 2.11 2.35 2.66 2.78 2.9 2.72 2.11 2.75 2.11 2.11 WmRA (%) 4.6; 5; 6.1 6.99; 7.13 5.19 6.27 4.67 6.24 6.71 6.61; 8.2 5.57 6.1 5.16 6.1 6.227.3 3.77 4.315.87 5.556.61 3.77 SSDRA (g/cm3) 2.33; 2.42; 2.45 2.26; 2.27 2.46 2.41 2.48 2.4 2.36 2.39; 2.41 2.45 2.61 2.48 2.41 2.382.46 2.54 2.542.58 2.42.46 2.53 DCA (mm) 19; 25 19 20 20 25 25 20 20 20 25 12 16 20 20 NR 20 20 rv (%) 0; 75 100 0; 20; 50; 100 0; 15; 30; 60; 100 0; 50 0; 30; 50; 100 0; 20; 50; 100 0; 100 0; 25; 50; 100 0; 60; 100 100 0; 20; 50; 100 0;15; 30; 50; 100 0; 20; 50; 80; 100 0; 50; 100 0; 100 0; 20; 50; 100 d (%) 0 0; 5 0 0 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 fcu (MPa) 1545 17.636.2 45.354.8 34.539 35.942.9 3546.9 36.245.9 32.641.5 38.274.4 34.253.2 4246 2348.5 26.462.6 37.148.6 2241.8 33.770.1 38.172.3 Source [2] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [56] [55] [2]

NR: Not recorded, considered 20 in this study.

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Z.H. Duan et al. / Construction and Building Materials 40 (2013) 12001206 values of network parameters considered in this approach are as follows: number of hidden layers = 0, 1, and 2; number of hidden neurons = 550; learning rate = 0.01, 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, 0.9, 1.0, and 2.0; momentum factor = 0.0, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, 0.9 and 1; and learning cycles = 500, 1000, 5000, 10,000, 20,000 and 50,000 (each cycle covers the entire database available for training). Based on the error of integral testing set after a series of trials as seen in Fig. 3, the best network architecture and parameters that maximize the R2 values of testing data are as follows.        Number of input layer units = 14 Number of hidden layers = 1 Number of hidden layer units = 16 Number of output layer units = 1 Momentum rate = 0.9 Learning rate = 0.3 Learning cycle = 10,000

The 28 day compressive strength was the only output value considered in the paper. Taking into account that different researchers used specimens of different sizes and shapes, all the results were converted into equivalent 15-cm cube compressive strength using conversion coefcients (CF) following established guidelines [41].

4.3. Data set A total 168 sets of experimental data from 17 different literature sources was collated to train and check the reliability of the strength model [2,4255]. It should be noted that Ref. [2] containing a total of 28 sets of data was our published work, which was divided into two parts: the rst part with 12 sets of data was used in the training set, while the second part with the other 16 sets of data, together with 6 sets of new unpublished data, were used in the testing set to test the accuracy of the prediction. Table 1 shows the minimum and maximum values of these parameters used in the model formulation while the sources of data are given in Table 2.

4.4. Construction of the ANN model The back-propagation network, adopted in this research, has 14 neurons (variables) in the input layer and one unit in the output layer as illustrated in Fig. 2. The

Fig. 4. Performance of training.

Fig. 2. Proposed ANN model.

Fig. 3. Selection of neurons number in hidden layer for testing sets with various learning rates.

Fig. 5. Performance of testing set.

Table 3 The results of compressive strength model of articial neural networks. Training set Data group 1 Number 146 R2 0.998 RMSE 1.7958 MAPE 0.2622 Testing set Data group 2 Number 22 R2 0.9955 RMSE 3.6804 MAPE 1.6777

Z.H. Duan et al. / Construction and Building Materials 40 (2013) 12001206 Table 4 Comparison of actual values with predicted results obtained from ANN models. No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 A (MPa) 33.7 39.6 37.4 40.8 41.1 45.3 48.6 45.3 42.5 38.1 66.8 P (MPa) 38.8 38.5 39.1 38.3 38.6 52.7 47.5 45.4 42.3 38.6 63.1 Abs (MPa) 5.1 1.1 1.7 2.5 2.5 7.4 1.1 0.1 0.2 0.5 3.7 n (%) 15.1 2.8 4.5 6.1 6.1 16.3 2.3 0.2 0.5 1.3 5.5 No. 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 A (MPa) 62.4 55.8 42 54.1 51.7 47.1 43.4 72.3 69.6 65.3 58.5 P (MPa) 61.5 58.1 48.8 51.6 49.1 44.6 38.1 68.2 67.8 67.1 63.3 Abs (MPa) 0.9 2.3 6.8 2.5 2.6 2.5 5.3 4.1 1.8 1.8 4.8

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n (%) 1.4 4.1 16.2 4.6 5 5.3 12.2 5.7 2.6 2.8 8.2

Table 3 shows the results of the back propagation networks with an architecture 14-16-1 model measured by the R2, MSE and MAPE. It can be seen that the coefcient of determination R2 value in the training set and the testing set were 0.998 and 0.9955, respectively; the values of RMSE and MAPE were 1.7958% and 0.2622% in the training set and 3.6804% and 1.6777% in the testing set. The results of the three criteria all showed better t in the training set than in the testing set. It has been demonstrated that the constructed ANN model was able to provide prediction of the 28-day compressive strength of RAC close to that of the experimental determined values. The performance of both the training and testing sets of ANN, when compared with the actual values can be seen in Figs. 4 and 5, from which it can be concluded that the proposed neural network could learn the relationship between the different input parameters and the output parameter. Also, it was able to model the compressive strength of concrete made with RA. A comparison of actual values and the predicted ones is listed in Table 4. Based on Table 4, the following can be observed:  The maximum and minimum absolute errors in the testing sets were 7.4 MPa and 0.1 MPa, respectively, with the individual values mainly in the range of 03 MPa; while the largest and smallest relative errors were 16.3% and 0.2%, respectively, and the average relative error of the total 22 sets of test data was about 5.85%, which can be considered as good and acceptable.  The constructed ANN model exhibited good prediction performance; it was able to t most of the compressive strength values close to the target strength. Among the 22 set of testing data, 18 of them, predicted by the 14-16-1 model, were with relative errors of less than 10%, with 17 results even no larger than 6.1%.  Some of the test data, did not t very well, and this might be due to several reasons including: (1) Erroneous experimental data itself, especially after converting the original test values to the 150 mm equivalent cube strength. (2) Cement type was not considered as an input parameter. As the details of the cement used in some of the literatures had not been reported. Besides, the cement used in the testing set was PC52.5 while the most adopted cement type was PC42.5 in the training set. (3) Different characteristics of RA, such as the processing methods used to produce the RA, sources of RA and the strength index of the RA, etc. In summary, the test results showed that the constructed ANN model was able to predict the compressive strength values of RAC accurately. In the testing set, the R2 and MAPE values of 0.9955% and 1.6777% respectively. When using ANN to predict the compressive strength value of RAC, the maximum particle size of aggregate, water absorption and SSD specic density can generally reect the properties of RA, however, the performance of ANN model can still be improved if more parameters can be considered, such as cement type and quality of the RA.

(3) The performance of neural networks model is still to be improved with more parameters be considered in the further research. It is interesting to know whether other properties of RAC, such as modulus of elasticity, durability, creep and shrinkage can be modeled as well by ANN. Further research should be undertaken to improve the ANN generalization ability.

Acknowledgement The authors would like to thank the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Sun Hung Kei Properties Ltd. for providing funding support.

References
[1] Rao A, Jha KN, Misra S. Use of aggregates from recycled construction and demolition waste in concrete. Resour Conserv Recycl 2007;50(1):7181. [2] Kou SC. Reusing recycled aggregates in structural concrete (dissertation). Hong Kong Polytechnic University; 2006. [3] Tsung YT, Yuen YC, Chao LH. Properties of HPC with recycled aggregates. Cem Concr Res 2006;36(5):94350. _ [4] Topu IB, Sardemir M. Prediction of properties of waste AAC aggregate concrete using articial neural network. Comput Mater Sci 2007;41(1):11725. [5] Ni HG, Wang JZ. Prediction of compressive strength of concrete by neural networks. Cem Concr Res 2000;30(8):124550. [6] Alshihri MM, Azmy AM, El-Bisy MS. Neural networks for predicting compressive strength of structural light weight concrete. Constr Build Mater 2009;23(6):22149. [7] Bilim C, Atis CD, Tanyildizi H, Karahan O. Predicting the compressive strength of ground granulated blast furnace slag concrete using articial neural network. Adv Eng Softw 2009;40(5):33440. [8] Kewalramani MA, Gupta R. Concrete compressive strength prediction using ultrasonic pulse velocity through articial neural networks. Autom Constr 2006;15(3):3749. [9] Yeh IC. Modeling slump ow of concrete using second-order regressions and articial neural networks. Cem Concr Compos 2007;29(6):47480. [10] Pala M, zbay E, ztas A, Yuce MI. Appraisal of long-term effects of y ash and silica fume on compressive strength of concrete by neural networks. Constr Build Mater 2007;21(2):38494. lu E, Tanyildizi H. Comparison of articial [11] zcan F, Atis CD, Karahan O, Uncuog neural network and fuzzy logic models for prediction of long-term compressive strength of silica fume concrete. Adv Eng Softw 2009;40(9):85663. [12] Sobhani J, Najimi M, Pourkhorshidi AR, Parhizkar T. Prediction of the compressive strength of no-slump concrete: a comparative study of regression, neural network and ANFIS models. Constr Build Mater 2010;24(5):70918. [13] Lee SC. Prediction of concrete strength using articial neural networks. Eng Struct 2003;25(7):84957. [14] Ince R. Prediction of fracture parameters of concrete by articial neural networks. Eng Fract Mech 2004;71(15):214359. ic F, Turk G. Prediction of concrete strength using ultrasonic [15] Trtnik G, Kavc pulse velocity and articial neural networks. Ultrasonics 2009;49(1):5360. _ [16] Topu IB, Sardemir M. Prediction of mechanical properties of recycled aggregate concretes containing silica fume using articial neural networks and fuzzy logic. Comput Mater Sci 2008;42(1):7482.

5. Conclusions In this paper, the articial neural networks method was assessed to see whether it can be used to predict the compressive strength of RAC. It can be seen that: (1) The maximum size of aggregates, water absorption values and SSD specic density can generally reect the properties of RA; (2) Articial neural networks has a fairly high accuracy on predicting the strength of RAC.

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