Environmentally Friendly Concrete Compressive Strength Prediction Using Hybrid Machine Learning

Abstract

In order to reduce the adverse effects of concrete on the environment, options for eco-friendly and green concretes are required. For example, geopolymers can be an economically and environmentally sustainable alternative to portland cement. This is accomplished through the utilization of alumina-silicate waste materials as a cementitious binder. These geopolymers are synthesized by activating alumina-silicate minerals with alkali. This paper employs a three-step machine learning (ML) approach in order to estimate the compressive strength of geopolymer concrete. The ML methods include CatBoost regressors, extra trees regressors, and gradient boosting regressors. In addition to the 84 experiments in the literature, 63 geopolymer concretes were constructed and tested. Using Python language programming, machine learning models were built from 147 green concrete samples and four variables. Three of these models were combined using a blending technique. Model performance was evaluated using several metric indices. Both the individual and the hybrid models can predict the compressive strength of geopolymer concrete with high accuracy. However, the hybrid model is claimed to be able to improve the prediction accuracy by 13%.