Bond strength prediction of spliced GFRP bars in concrete beams using soft computing methods

The bond between the concrete and bar is a main factor affecting the performance of the reinforced concrete (RC) members, and since the steel corrosion reduces the bond strength, studying the bond behavior of concrete and GFRP bars is quite necessary. In this research, a database including 112 concrete beam test specimens reinforced with spliced GFRP bars in the splitting failure mode has been collected and used to estimate the concrete-GFRP bar bond strength. This paper aims to accurately estimate the bond strength of spliced GFRP bars in concrete beams by applying three soft computing models including multivariate adaptive regression spline (MARS), Kriging, and M5 model tree. Since the selection of regularization parameters greatly affects the fitting of MARS, Kriging, and M5 models, the regularization parameters have been so optimized as to maximize the training data convergence coefficient. Three hybrid model coupling soft computing methods and genetic algorithm is proposed to automatically perform the trial and error process for finding appropriate modeling regularization parameters. Results have shown that proposed models have significantly increased the prediction accuracy compared to previous models. The proposed MARS, Kriging, and M5 models have improved the convergence coefficient by about 65, 63 and 49%, respectively, compared to the best previous model.