Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2016) 131: 108
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2016-16108-5

Regular Article

Prediction of zeolite-cement-sand unconfined compressive strength using polynomial neural network

Geotechnical Department, Babol University of Technology (BUT), Babol, Iran

^* e-mail: hma@stu.nit.ac.ir

Received: 20 November 2015
Accepted: 15 February 2016
Published online: 21 April 2016

Abstract

The improvement of local soils with cement and zeolite can provide great benefits, including strengthening slopes in slope stability problems, stabilizing problematic soils and preventing soil liquefaction. Recently, dosage methodologies are being developed for improved soils based on a rational criterion as it exists in concrete technology. There are numerous earlier studies showing the possibility of relating Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) and Cemented sand (CS) parameters (voids/cement ratio) as a power function fits. Taking into account the fact that the existing equations are incapable of estimating UCS for zeolite cemented sand mixture (ZCS) well, artificial intelligence methods are used for forecasting them. Polynomial-type neural network is applied to estimate the UCS from more simply determined index properties such as zeolite and cement content, porosity as well as curing time. In order to assess the merits of the proposed approach, a total number of 216 unconfined compressive tests have been done. A comparison is carried out between the experimentally measured UCS with the predictions in order to evaluate the performance of the current method. The results demonstrate that generalized polynomial-type neural network has a great ability for prediction of the UCS. At the end sensitivity analysis of the polynomial model is applied to study the influence of input parameters on model output. The sensitivity analysis reveals that cement and zeolite content have significant influence on predicting UCS.