A H L Swaroop

Concrete structures and the associated cracking represent a persistent challenge within the fields of construction and civil engineering, a dilemma that has persisted for decades. Generally, cracks arise from the expansion and contraction of materials, which can lead to various forms of damage within buildings. Engineers typically address these damages and irregularities through manual inspections or by employing predictive models developed using machine learning techniques, thereby facilitating a comprehensive assessment of the structural health of the edifices. This research aims to implement tools such as the VGG 16 network model alongside other machine learning methodologies to identifycracks in concrete structures. We propose a model that integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) with a VGG-based architecture. For image processing and segmentation, we have employed the gradient boosting algorithm. The datasets utilized in this study were sourced from the Kaggle platform, and the Hugging Face Transformers library was leveraged for implementation. To assess the performance of the developed models, metrics including precision, accuracy, recall, and F1 score were employed.

In recent times, the high cost and general shortage of reinforcing steel in many parts of the world has lead to increasing interest in the possible use of alternative locally available materials for the reinforcement of concrete. This is case especially in the developing countries where about 80% of population lives in villages.This has lead to research on several non-ferrous reinforcing materials in structural concrete and also steel, cement, synthetic polymers and metal alloys used for construction activities are energy intensive as well as cause environmental pollution during their entire life cycle. In this context, use of bamboo which is fast growing and ecologically friendly material for structural applications especially in a tropical country like India is being considered as quite appropriate and also bamboo is a natural material which has great appeal in terms of availability and ease of use in the rural and farming communities in developing world. The study aims at exploring ways of making the use of bamboo as building material in reinforced concrete as simple, efficient and cost-effective for rural area construction.