Effect of recycling hospital ash on the compressive properties of concrete: statistical assessment and predicting model

The compressive strength of mixtures made with bottom and fly hospital ash are compared statistically with those of microsilica and conventional concretes in order to evaluate the effectiveness of reusing hospital incinerator ash. Results showed that the concrete cubes recipe and temperature influence the compressive strength values. Generally, the use of microsilica or fly ash, as cement replacement, of 5% by mass increases the compressive strength of concrete at temperatures up to 800degreesC. Bottom ash did not achieve any increase in strength when used as cement replacement at all percentages. Finally, artificial neural network (ANN) analysis was conducted to study the practicability of using the ANN theoretical model as a prediction tool. The results showed that a one hidden layer back propagation algorithm could produce reasonable outputs that coincide with the experimental results after proper training. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.