Prediction Models of Shielding Effectiveness of Carbon Fibre Reinforced Cement-Based Composites against Electromagnetic Interference

With the rapid development of communication technology as well as a rapid rise in the usage of electronic devices, a growth of concerns over unintentional electromagnetic interference emitted by these devices has been witnessed. Pioneer researchers have deeply studied the relationship between the shielding effectiveness and a few mixed design parameters for cementitious composites incoporating carbon fibres by conducting physical experiments. This paper, therefore, aims to develop and propose a series of prediction models for the shielding effectiveness of cementitious composites involving carbon fibres using frequency and mixed design parameters, such as the water-to-cement ratio, fibre content, sand-to-cement ratio and aspect ratio of the fibres. A multi-variable non-linear regression model and a backpropagation neural network (BPNN) model were developed to meet the different accuracy requirements as well as the complexity requirements. The results showed that the regression model reached an R2 of 0.88 with a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 2.3 dB for the testing set while the BPNN model had an R2 of 0.96 with an RMSE of 2.64 dB. Both models exhibited a sufficient prediction accuracy, and the results also supported that both the regression and the BPNN model are reasonable for such estimation.