Assessment of the relationships between different P-wave velocity measurement techniques in rocks

P-wave velocity is a non-destructive test (NDT) commonly used in several disciplines (archaeology, restoration, geology, civil engineering, etc.). This test has different measurement techniques (direct, semi-direct and indirect) and there is limited information about the correlations between these methods. With this aim, relationships between different P-wave velocity measurement techniques were researched using 123 square prism samples with dimensions of 10 x 10 x 18 cm prepared from 41 different rock types (plutonic, volcanic, pyroclastic and sedimentary). According to the results, high coefficients of determination (R^2: 0.872–0.910) were determined for simple regression relationships between the different P-wave velocity measurements. Among the different P-wave velocity measurement methods, the highest P-wave velocity was measured with the semi-direct method, whereas the indirect method generally yielded the lowest values. For multiple regression correlations between the three different measurement methods, the coefficients of determination (R^2) varied from 0.898 to 0.928.