A Proposed Model for Compressive Strength Prediction of FRP-Confined Rectangular Columns in terms of Genetic Expression Programming (GEP)

Fiber reinforced polymers (FRP) are one of the most commonly used materials for rehabilitation and retrofit of structures, mainly concrete structures. There are many reported studies on the behavior of these materials under different types of loading and structures. The aim of this study is to declare the challenges and investigate the efficiency of existing models for samples with rectangular and square sections. Moreover, a new empirical model is developed to predict the strength of FRP confined samples using gene expression programming (GEP). The best model is selected after establishing and controlling several models with different combinations of the influencing parameters. An analysis is carried out to check the performance of the introduced model based on the common criteria such as correlation of coefficient (R). This parameter is 0.923 and 0.922 for training and testing datasets, respectively which reveals a good agreement between the predicted and measured data in the developed GEP model.