Prediction of the mechanical properties of granites under tension using DM techniques

The estimation of the strength and other mechanical parameters characterizing the tensile behavior of granites can play an important role in civil engineering tasks such as design, construction, rehabilitation and repair of existing structures. The purpose of this paper is to apply data mining techniques, such as multiple regression (MR), artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector machines (SVM) to estimate the mechanical properties of granites. In a first phase, the mechanical parameters defining the complete tensile behavior are estimated based on the tensile strength. In a second phase, the estimation of the mechanical properties is carried out from different combination of the physical properties (ultrasonic pulse velocity, porosity and density). It was observed that the estimation of the mechanical properties can be optimized by combining different physical properties. Besides, it was seen that artificial neural networks and support vector machines performed better than multiple regression model.This work was partly financed by FEDER funds through the Competitivity Factors Operational Programme - COMPETE and by national funds through FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology within the scope of the project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007633.