Workability and strength optimisation of concrete utilising artificial sand blended with natural sand for road pavement

Workability and strength optimisation of concrete utilising artificial sand blended with natural sand was carried out in this paper for road pavement. There were 18 concrete mixtures with their different compositions were designed and tested. Firstly, three parameters, which were slump, compressive strength, and flexural strength of the concretes, were measured from experimental test and then evaluated. The combination between artificial sand and natural sand in marking concrete was observed to possibly improve all three parameters. Secondly, three analytical tools, including Taguchi technique (TT), multiple regression technique (MRT) and artificial neural network (ANN), were employed to predict the optimal slump, compressive strength, and flexural strength of the tested concretes based on the experimental results. The MRT performed the highest accuracy while the ANN model performed the lowest. Besides, the artificial sand to natural sand ratio was the most influencing factor on the slump and compressive strength of the concretes, whereas the water to cement ratio was the most influencing factor on the flexural strength. The artificial sand could replace the natural sand with ratio between them in range of 2.0–2.34 for achieving the best concrete performances.