TECHNOLOGIES
Artificial intelligence-assisted framework for predicting electrochemical deterioration of reinforced concrete structures under combined chloride and stray current exposure
- 1 State University of Novi Pazar, Department of Technical and Technological Sciences, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Novi Pazar, Serbia
- 2 University of Pristina, Faculty of Technical Sciences, Architecture, Kosovska Mitrovica
Abstract
Reinforcement corrosion remains a major cause of premature deterioration of reinforced concrete infrastructure, especially when chloride ingress and stray direct currents act simultaneously. This paper develops and computationally demonstrates an artificial intelligence-assisted framework for predicting a relative electrochemical deterioration score from seven measurable inputs: corrosion potential, concrete electrical resistivity, corrosion current density, chloride content, moisture, temperature and stray-current intensity. A reproducible synthetic parametric database of 1,200 scenarios was generated within physically plausible engineering ranges. Four supervised learning models—an artificial neural network, Random Forest, support vector regression and Gradient Boosting—were trained using a 75/25 stratified train-test split. Prediction accuracy was assessed by R², mean absolute error and root mean square error, while permutation importance was used to interpret the dominant predictors. The ensemble models achieved the strongest performance, and the importance analysis confirmed that corrosion current density, chloride content and electrical resistivity exerted the largest influence on the predicted condition. The results are a methodological demonstration rather than validation against laboratory or field measurements. The proposed workflow is intended to complement conventional electrochemical inspection, support maintenance prioritisation and provide a transparent basis for future calibration using monitored reinforced concrete structures.
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