Experimental investigation on potential use of drilling parameters to quantify rock strength

Abstract The uniaxial compressive strength (UCS) represents the strength of the rock. It frequently requires during the introductory phase of mining projects such as tunneling, rock excavation, blast hole designs, etc. Usually, the determination of UCS of rocks is carrying out in a concerned laboratory. The main drawback of determining the UCS in a laboratory requires at least five core samples of high-grade quality. Many problems and limitations are associated with removing the core, and also preparing the test specimen for UCS is tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. Therefore an attempt is made to develop an efficient indirect method to estimate the UCS of rocks without using the core samples. In this experimental investigation, the drilling response, such as thrust, is gathered by drill tool dynamometer considering the different drill operating parameters. The prediction model is developed with a regression technique using the measured thrust and calculated torque. The prediction capacity and validation of the model are carried out using the standard procedure. The experimental results show that the model could explain the variance in UCS up to 93.60%. RMSE and MAPE values in terms of percentage are 3.49% and 11.27%, respectively. Besides, the model's validation is checked for sandstone and limestone having the UCS 28 MPa and 35 MPa, respectively, and yielded the best prediction results with an error of 8.51% and 8.01% suggesting that the developed model could predict the UCS of sedimentary rock types within acceptable error limit, and reasonably. The correlation of UCS of rocks and drilling specific energy is also tested and found that linear relationship between them with an R2 value of 92.10%