Estimating the engineering properties of marl stone by using punch test

Since a lot of man-made constructions have been built on the surface of rocks or inside them, the determination of rock different parameters which use for designing purposes is of great significance. In some rocks, because of the presence of thin bedding or schistosity planes, rock cores are separated to small discs of which the core length may be too short to prepare standard specimens for conducting tests such as uniaxial compressive strength. Marlstone falls into this category. In this research, uniaxial compressive strength test, punch test, point load test, velocity sound determination test, Brazilian test and specific gravity determination test are performed on some specimens of marlstone collected from Imamzadeh Hashem area located in Gilan province and Abgarm city situated in Qazvin province. This research aims to provide some relations by using of which one can estimate the point load index, uniaxial compressive strength, tension strength and compressive wave velocity through punch test results. The results show that the properties of marlstone can be estimated with a high level of accuracy by using the proposed relations because the correlation coefficient of all the relations is above 0.79.