Physics-assisted machine learning methods for predicting the splitting tensile strength of recycled aggregate concrete

Recycled aggregate concrete (RAC) has become a popular building material due to its eco-friendly features, but the difficulty in predicting the crack resistance of RAC is increasingly impeding its application. In this study, splitting tensile strength is adopted to describe the crack resistance ability of RAC, and physics-assisted machine learning (ML) methods are used to construct the predictive models for the splitting tensile strength of RAC. The results show that the AdaBoost model has excellent predictive performance with the help of the Firefly algorithm, and physical assistance plays a remarkable role in selecting features and verifying the ML models. Due to the limit in data size and the generalizability of the model, the dataset should be supplemented with more representative data, and an algorithm for small sample sizes could be studied in the future.