Prediction the effects of ZnO2 nanoparticles on splitting tensile strength and water absorption of high strength concrete

In the present paper, two models based on artificial neural networks (ANN) and gene expression programming (GEP) for predicting splitting tensile strength and water absorption of concretes containing ZnO2 nanoparticles at different ages of curing have been developed. To build these models, training and testing using experimental results for 144 specimens produced with 16 different mixture proportions were conducted. The used data in the multilayer feed forward neural networks models and input variables of genetic programming models are arranged in a format of eight input parameters that cover the cement content (C), nanoparticle content (N), aggregate type (AG), water content (W), the amount of superplasticizer (S), the type of curing medium (CM), Age of curing (AC) and number of testing try (NT). According to these input parameters, in the neural networks and genetic programming models, the splitting tensile strength and water absorption values of concretes containing ZnO2 nanoparticles were predicted. The training and testing results in these two models have shown the strong potential of the models for predicting the splitting tensile strength and water absorption values of concretes containing ZnO2 nanoparticles. Although neural networks have predicted better results, genetic programming is able to predict reasonable values with a simpler method rather than neural networks

A review of numerical analysis of friction stir welding

Friction stir welding is a relatively new solid-state joining technique which is widely adopted in different industry fields to join different metallic alloys that are hard to weld by conventional fusion welding. Friction stir welding is a highly complex process comprising several highly coupled physical phenomena. The complex geometry of some kinds of joints and their three dimensional nature make it difficult to develop an overall system of governing equations for theoretical analyzing the behavior of the friction stir welded joints. The experiments are often time consuming and costly. To overcome these problems, numerical analysis has frequently been used since the 2000s. This paper reviews the latest developments in the numerical analysis of friction stir welding processes, microstructures of friction stir welded joints and the properties of friction stir welded structures. Some important numerical issues such as materials flow modeling, meshing procedure and failure criteria are discussed. Numerical analysis of friction stir welding will allow many different welding processes to be simulated in order to understand the effects of changes in different system parameters before physical testing, which would be time-consuming or prohibitively expensive in practice. The main methods used in numerical analysis of friction stir welding are discussed and illustrated with brief case studies. In addition, several important key problems and issues remain to be addressed about the numerical analysis of friction stir welding and opportunities for further research are identified