Neural network based approach for determining the shear strength of circular reinforced concrete columns

The objective of this study is to investigate the adequacy of neural networks (NN) as a quicker, more secure and more robust method to determine the shear strength of circular reinforced concrete columns. In the application of the NN model, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) with a back-propagation (BP) algorithm is employed using a scaled conjugate gradient. NN model is developed, trained and tested through a based MATLAB program. The data used for training and testing NN model are gathered from literature. NN based model outputs are compared with ACI, ATC-32, ASCE and CALTRANS codes outcomes on the basis of the experimental results. This comparison demonstrated that the NN based model is highly successful to determine the shear strength of circular reinforced concrete columns. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.