2nd International Conference on Civil Engineering for Sustainable Development (ICCESD-2014)

ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK APPROACH FOR THE PREDICTION OF

UPLIFT CAPACITY OF ANCHOR FOUNDATION
Md. Rokonuzzaman*1, Masum Shaikh 2 and Sayed Isahaq Hossain3
1

Associate professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Khulna University of Engineering & Technology,
Khulna-9203, Bangladesh, e-mail: rokoncekuet@yahoo.com
2
Lecturer, Department of Civil Engineering, Khulna University of Engineering & Technology,
Khulna-9203, Bangladesh, e-mail: masumkuetce0701102@gmail.com
3
Graduate Student, Department of Civil Engineering, Khulna University of Engineering & Technology,
Khulna-9203, Bangladesh

1. Introduction
There are many examples in civil engineering design where the requirement to resist pull-out forces acting on
foundations embedded in the ground has to be met. In such cases an attractive and economic design solution
may be achieved by the use of tension members that are fixed to the foundation and embedded in the ground to
sufficient depth that they can be resist the pull out forces with adequate safety. These members are referred to as
anchors. Since anchor foundations having different embedment ratios, sizes, and shapes are widely used for
towers, bridges, and various other structures in order to resist tensile (upward) forces, many studies have
focused on pulling out these types of foundations. For the safe and economical design of the anchor foundation,
it is very necessary to provide an accurate numerical model with the geotechnical engineers. The prediction of
uplift capacity of anchor rectangular foundation can be easily done by artificial neural analysis (ANN). During
the last two decades several researchers have developed eective modelling tools such as ANNs and fuzzy rule
based approaches in engineering.This study has been done to investigate the feasibility of the ANN technique
for predicting the uplift capacity of anchor foundations in cohesion less soils and to provide an executable
program of the developed ANN model for routine use in practice. The effect of ANN geometry and some
internal parameters on the performance of ANN models will be focused.
2. Development of Neural Network Model
The steps for developing ANN models include the determination of model inputs and outputs, division and preprocessing of the available data, the determination of appropriate network architecture, optimization of the
connection weights (training), stopping criteria, and model validation. The ANN toolbox of MATLAB (The
MATHWORKS 2011 R2011a) is used to simulate the problem.
3.

Database , Model Input and Output

In order to calibrate and validate the ANN model, data were collected from the literature and include the
laboratory model tests on the uplift capacity of anchor foundation. The data cover a wide range of variation in
anchor dimensions and soil properties. A thorough understanding of the factors affecting the uplift capacity of
anchor is needed in order to obtain accurate breakout factor prediction. The main factors affecting anchor
capacity includes: width (B), embedment (H/B), aspect ratio (L/B), inclination (), soil denseness (Dr) and soil
unit weight (). The aforementioned factors are presented to the ANN as model input variables. Dimensionless
breakout factor (Nq) is the single output variable.
4.

Model Architecture

Determining the network architecture is one of the most important and difficult tasks in the development of
ANN models. It requires the selection of the number of hidden layers and the number of nodes in each of these.
It has been shown that a network with one hidden layer can approximate any continuous function, provided that
sufficient connection weights are used (Hornik et al. 1989).Consequently, one hidden layer is used in this study.
The number of nodes in the input and output layers are restricted by the number of model inputs and outputs.
The input layer of the ANN model developed in this work has six nodes, one for each of the model inputs i.e.,
width (B), embedment (H/B), aspect ratio (L/B), inclination (), soil denseness (Dr) and soil unit weight (). In
order to determine the optimum network geometry, ANNs with two, five, ten, and 15 hidden layer nodes are
trained.

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2nd International Conference on Civil Engineering for Sustainable Development (ICCESD-2014)

5.

Model Validation

The purpose of the model validation phase is to ensure that the model has the ability to generalize within the
limits set by the training data, rather than simply having memorized the inputoutput relationships that are
contained in the training data. The coefficient of determination (R 2) and the root-mean-square error (RMSE) are
the main criteria that are used to evaluate the performance of the ANN models developed in this work. Final
model is chosen with hidden neuron of five due its bets performance (Table-1).
Table -1: Performance of different networks
Hidden
neurons
2
5
10
15

Root Mean
Square
Error (RMSE)
(Validation)
11.6377 at epoch 10
1.2525 at epoch 8
7.9851 at epoch 7
3.0006 at epoch 8

Coefficient of determination of R2
(%)
Training

Testing

Validation

76.30
93.03
81.18
95.53

69.93
90.33
86.67
83.53

85.52
98.84
88.08
97.50

6. Parametric Study
ANN modeling provides a convenient way of conducting a parametric study. The effect of each parameter on
the value of uplift capacity at a certain site is further investigated in this study (Figure- 1 and Figure-2).

Figure -1: Pullout capacity as a function of H/B

ratio (L/B=2 and B=50 mm)

Figure -2: Pullout capacity as a function of L/B

ratio (H/B=3 and B=50 mm)

7. Conclusions
A back-propagation neural network was used to demonstrate the feasibility of ANNs to predict the uplift
capacity of anchor foundations in cohesion less soils. A neural Network model is developed for the uplift
capacity of anchor foundation. The six input parameters to the neural model are the embedment ratio, aspect
ratio, size, inclination, unit weight and denseness of soil. The output of neural network is the uplift capacity of
anchor foundation. ANNs have the advantage that once the model is trained, it can be used as an accurate and
quick tool for estimating the uplift capacity of anchor foundation without a need to perform any manual work
such as using tables or charts. Like all empirical models, the range of applicability of ANNs is constrained by
the data used in the model calibration phase and ANNs should thus be recalibrated as new data become
available. However, despite the aforementioned limitations, the results of this study indicate that ANNs have a
number of significant benefits that make them a powerful and practical tool for anchor capacity prediction of
anchor foundation in cohesionless soils.
References
Hornik, K., Stinchcombe, M., and White, H. (1989). Multilayer feed-forward networks are universal
approximators. Neural Networks, 2, pp. 359366.

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