Investigation of the effect of textural properties towards predicting sawing performance of diamond wire machines

Diamond wire machines have an important position among the other machines used for block production. One of the most important factors affecting the production rates in quarrying is the performance estimation of these machines. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationships between textural and physico-mechanical properties of four natural stones and sawing performance of four different diamond wire machines. To achieve this goal, four different natural stone quarries were visited and stone samples having the dimensions of 30 × 30 × 30 cm³ were obtained from these quarries. During the quarry studies, sawability performance of the machines was measured in detail. Physico-mechanical property tests and textural property analysis were carried out according to the ISRM and ASTM standards. Investigations indicate that areal sawing performance of diamond wire machines has strong correlation with texture coefficient and mean grain size; on the other hand, it has moderate or weak correlations with physico-mechanical properties.