Thermo-mechanical performance of coral mortar with bagasse ash and PVA fibers under high temperatures: experimental and explainable modeling

Abstract

This study prepared PVA fiber-reinforced coral mortar incorporating sugarcane bagasse ash (SCBA), hereafter referred to as SPCM, focusing on the thermo-mechanical properties of SPCM with varying dosages of SCBA and PVA fibers exposed to different temperatures (25–500 °C). The results showed that the synergistic optimum dosage of 20 % SCBA and 1.5 % PVA fibers increased the compressive and flexural strength of SPCM by 36.53 % and 23.16 %, respectively. The critical temperature was 300 °C, beyond which the synergistic effect of SCBA and PVA fibers on the thermo-mechanical properties of SPCM was not significant. Additionally, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm was used for tuning the hyperparameter of XGBoost models, and PSO-XGBoost model demonstrated optimal prediction performance and accuracy for the thermo-mechanical performance of SPCM. Furthermore, the interpretability measure Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) was introduced to gain comprehensive insights into the decision-making process for predicting strength of SPCM.