Consideration for evaluation patterns of normalized RMR parameters

Due to the convenience, RMR has been widely applied in civil engineering works such as tunnel, slope, and so on. Many researchers have studied to suggest more simple and trustable RMR by modifying its parameters. However, those researches have just focused on looking for easy modified-RMRs by reducing number of parameters using various statistical analyses. Therefore, this research studied questions of modified-RMRs and gaps between RMR and its parameters. Approximately 2,000 parameters of 400 RMRs from various tunnel sites were normalized respectively and compared with one another to study their relations and divergences. The comparison results showed that there were common patterns among RMR and parameters. Data of uniaxial compressive strength and RQD, qualitative parameters, were located in upper side of RMR line. Discontinuity condition and ground water, quantitative oriented parameters, were opposite to them. It means if both qualitative and quantitative parameters can be properly combined then it can be easy to make simple and easy modified-RMRs without using difficult statistics. This results also show that the majority of field engineers used to estimate RMR conservatively when they did quantitative oriented parameters.