Investigation into mineralogical-petrographical, physical & mechanical properties of Karacaoren-sivrihisar (eskisehir) marbles

Marble has become an indispensable structural material through years due to its mechanical, physical and optical properties. Throughout history, marbles were used for plating floors, covering and cladding the walls and being the columns. However, the variety of marble and marble products usage has considerably increased nowadays. In parallel to this situation, demand in the marble and marble products has increased much more than that. Turkey meets to respond more than this growing demand of user diversity and variety of marbles, hosts significant reserves. In this context, the formation of marble where near the village of Karacaören the town of Eskişehir Sivrihisar were investigated in terms of mineralogical, petrographical, mechanical and physical properties. This formation can be divided into North and South fields. While the marble of South field mainly composed of calcite marbles, those of North field mainly contains dolomite. A set of laboratory tests were carried out by petrographical and mineralogical structure, physical properties such as bulk density, water absorption, and mechanical properties such as flexural strength, abrasion resistance, and uniaxial compressive strength. The experiments performed by the standards of ISRM and/or TS, and the results point out that threshold values covers the reasonable intervals which specified in the [standards].