Prediction of ultimate strength of reinforced concrete beams subjected to torsion using artificial neural networks

Abstract EN

Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) has been applied to structural engineering in recent years.

Most of the researches are based on back propagation neural networks due to its well-studied theory.

A back propagation neural network has been used to predict the ultimate torsional strength of reinforced concrete rectangular beams.

The effects of the parameters, such as the number of nodes in the input, output and hidden layers and the pre-process of the training patterns, on the behavior of the neural network have been investigated.

The algorithm called 'resilient propagation algorithm' has been used to the performance of the neural network.

After training, the generalization of the neural network was tested by the patterns not included in the training patterns.

Once the neural network has been trained, the ultimate torsional strength of reinforced concrete is obtained very easily and efficiently.

Based on the ANN results, a parametric analysis was carried out to study the influence of parameters affecting the ultimate torsional strength of reinforced concrete beams and these results are compared with the equations of ACI-code.