Author : Vijay G. Kondekar 1
Date of Publication :25th January 2018
Abstract: The earth or mud is being used for building houses all over the world since ancient times. Earthen construction has gained a significant interest and beneficial edge due to its ‘environment-friendly’ and ‘sustainable’ properties and also due to the heritage value of numerous historic buildings. In the Maharashtra State of India, a stabilized soil; locally known as ‘Gadhi Soil’ (GS) had been traditionally used for the construction of rural houses since many generations. These houses have provided excellent seasonal comfort, strength, and durability. In the local construction of these houses, people have been using GS for constructing load bearing cob walls of about 300-450 mm thickness for their houses since several generations. From the physical properties of GS, it is classified as inorganic silts of medium to high plasticity. The compressive strength of the earthen blocks of GS is about 1 MPa and a successful attempt was made to improve its strength by preparing adobe bricks of modified mix adding local quarry sand (QS), cement (C) and fly ash(FA); mix optimized by proportioning the ingredients using Modified Fuller Parabola. Adobe is a sun-dried mud brick and the traditional adobe is made with soil composed of a homogeneous mixture of clay, sand, and silt. There had been a few attempts to use Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) on earthen blocks The methodology included the casting of adobe bricks and carrying out ultrasonic tests using Ultrasonic Pulse Analyzer by the direct method of wave propagation. The ultrasonic pulse velocity (V) through the brick samples was determined and an attempt is made to correlate the UPV with the density and the compressive strength of adobe bricks. Those have shown better relationships with the increasing cement contents and also with variations in fly ash contents. A better relationship is observed within the groups made as per their type of mixes. It shows that the adobes can also be standardized by using NDT method viz. ultrasonic pulse velocity measurements and indicates the promising further use of this method in the cracks determination, maintenance, and rehabilitation of earthen walls.
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