Statistical Analysis of the Lifetime of Diamond-Impregnated Tools for Core Drilling of Concrete

Abstract

The lifetime of diamond-impregnated tools for core drilling of concrete is studied via the lifetimes of the single diamonds on the tool. Thereby, the number of visible and active diamonds on the tool surface is determined by microscopical inspections of the tool at given points in time. This leads to interval-censored lifetime data if only the diamonds visible at the beginning are considered. If also the lifetimes of diamonds appearing during the drilling process are included, then the lifetimes are doubly interval-censored. We use a well-known maximum likelihood method to analyze the interval-censored data and derive a new extension of it for the analysis of the doubly interval-censored data. The methods are applied to three series of experiments which differ in the size of the diamonds and the type of concrete. It turns out that the lifetimes of small diamonds used for drilling into conventional concrete are much shorter than the lifetimes when using large diamonds or high-strength concrete.