Investigation on correlation between pulse velocity and compressive strength of concrete using ANNs

The ultrasonic pulse velocity method has been widely used to evaluate the quality of concrete and assess the structural integrity of concrete structures. But its use for predicting strength is still limited since there are many variables affecting the relationship between strength and pulse velocity of concrete. This study is focused on establishing a complicated correlation between known input data, such as pulse velocity and mixture proportions of concrete, and a certain output (compressive strength of concrete) using artificial neural networks (ANN). In addition, the results predicted by the developed multilayer perceptrons (MLP) networks are compared with those by conventional regression analysis. The result shows that the correlation between pulse velocity and compressive strength of concrete at various ages can be well established by using ANN and the accuracy of the estimates depends on the quality of the information used to train the network. Moreover, compared with the conventional approach, the proposed method gives a better prediction, both in terms of coefficients of determination and root-mean-square error.