A deep learning approach to concrete water-cement ratio prediction

Concrete is a versatile construction material, but the water content can greatly influence its quality. However, using the trials and error method to determine the optimum water for the concrete mix results in poor quality concrete structures, which often end up in landfills as construction wastes, thus threatening environmental safety. This paper develops deep neural networks to predict the required water for a normal concrete mix. Standard data samples obtained from certified/leading laboratories were fed into a deep learning model (multilayers feedforward neural network) to automate the calibration of mixing power of the concrete water content for improved water control accuracy. We randomly split the data into 70%, 15% and 15%, respectively, to train, validate and test the model. The developed DNN model was subjected to relevant statistical metrics and benchmarked against the random forest, gradient boosting machines, and support vector machines. The performance indices obtained by the DNN model have the highest reliability compared to other models for concrete water prediction.