Compressive strength is the most important durability index for concrete structures and also the key factor to assess the quality or condition of concrete. However, existing estimation methods, which are simple and applicable on site for compressive strength, have not sufficient accuracy due to variety of concrete material characteristics. In this study, a compressive strength estimation method for concrete structures using drilling tests and pattern recognition techniques is proposed. By observing the drilling behavior and comparing the physical quantity such as mean and/or deviation of drilling speed, torque, rotation speed, etc., the parameters highly correlated to compressive strength can be extracted. The feature vectors which have good ability of classifying the compressive strength are then obtained by considering the combination of extracted parameters and drilling sections. Based on it, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) is built. The results show that the classification can achieve higher resolution compared with the results of multiple regression analysis. At last, applicability of the proposed compressive strength estimation method is well demonstrated.
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