Predicting elastic properties of schistose rocks from unconfined strength using intelligent approach

Abstract

Elastic properties of rocks play a major and crucial role for the design of any engineering structure. Determination of elastic properties in laboratory is tedious, laborious, very time consuming, as well as expertise is required, whereas determination of uniaxial compressive strength (UCS) and tensile strength in laboratory is simple, easy, and less expertise is required. Here, an attempt has been made to predict the elastic properties (Poisson’s ratio and Young’s modulus) of the schistose rocks from unconfined strength (UCS and tensile strength) using artificial neural network (ANN). A three-layer feed-forward back propagation neural network with 2-5-2 architecture was trained up to 855 epochs to predict the elastic properties of rock mass. The network was trained and tested by 120 data sets, and validation of the network was done by 20 new randomly selected data sets of UCS and tensile strength. The samples were collected from the schistose rocks of Nathpa-Jhakri hydropower project site, SJVNL, Himachal Pradesh, India. To check the validity and suitability of the artificial neural network technique, multivariate regression analysis (MVRA) is also performed, and comparison has been made. It was found that ANN gives closer values of predicted Poisson’s ratio and Young’s modulus as compared to MVRA. The coefficient of determination for Poisson’s ratio was 0.9809 and 0.843 by ANN and MVRA, respectively, whereas 0.9922 and 0.9362 for Young’s modulus by ANN and MVRA, respectively. The mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) for Young’s modulus is 11.13 and 28.21 by ANN and MVRA, respectively; whereas MAPE for Poisson’s ratio is 3.64 and 9.23 by ANN and MVRA, respectively.