Predicting strength development of RMSM using ultrasonic pulse velocity and artificial neural network

Ready-mixed soil material, known as a kind of controlled low-strength material, is a new way of soil cement combination. It can be used as backfill materials. In this paper, artificial neural network and nonlinear regression approach were applied to predict the compressive strength of ready-mixed soil material containing Portland cement, slag, sand, and soil in mixture. The data used for analyzing were obtained from our testing program. In the experiment, we carried out a mix design with three proportions of sand to soil (e. g., 6: 4, 5: 5, and 4: 6). In addition, blast furnace slag partially replaced cement to improve workability, whereas the water-to-binder ratio was fixed. Testing was conducted on samples to estimate its engineering properties as per ASTM such as flowability, strength, and pulse velocity. Based on testing data, the empirical pulse velocity-strength correlation was established by regression method. Next, three topologies of neural network were developed to predict the strength, namely ANN-I, ANN-II, and ANN-III. The first two models are back-propagation feed-forward networks, and the other one is radial basis neural network. The results show that the compressive strength of ready-mixed soil material can be well-predicted from neural networks. Among all currently proposed neural network models, the ANN-I gives the best prediction because it is closest to the actual strength. Moreover, considering combination of pulse velocity and other factors, viz. curing time, and material contents in mixture, the proposed neural networks offer better evaluation than interpolated from pulse velocity only.