A Novel Compressive Strength Estimation Approach for 3D Printed Fiber-Reinforced Concrete (2024-04)¶

3D concrete printing (3DCP) is crucial in the construction because of the low labor cost, eco-friendly behavior; however, getting a proper mixture is always a challenge. This study focuses on predicting the compressive strength (CS) of fiber-reinforced concrete produced with 3DCP using eight machine learning (ML) algorithms to get optimized mixture. The ML models were trained and tested using a comprehensive database on CS collected from literature considering the various fiber-reinforced cementitious composites, comprising over 299 mixtures with 11 features. The results show that the trained ML models could predict CS with R2 ranging from 0.927 to 0.990 and 0.914 to 0.988 for the training and testing dataset, respectively. Furthermore, supplementary experiments were conducted to create a new dataset to validate the predictive model's accuracy, with the extreme gradient boosting (XGB) and gene expression programming (GEP). Based on the GEP, a novel empirical equation was proposed and rigorously validated using experiments. The equation exhibits a high accuracy with the GEP algorithm (R2 = 0.89), providing real-world field applications that might be improve decision-making and mixture optimization, which contributes to advancements, efficiency, and innovative solutions in 3D printing practical domains.