Advantages Of Earthen Materials

Earthen materials show interesting environmental advantages when used to build [1]. These materials are becoming increasingly important in the context of the modern desire of construction materials which are less highly processed and have low toxicity [2][3][4].
Nowadays, there are several available techniques where these materials can be used with structural purposes, namely as earth blocks (adobe), compressed earth blocks (CEB), rammed earth and cob [5] but the lack of scientific data and lack of experience by the mainstream construction industry in using these materials remain barriers to be overcome [6]. As earth is a heavy, low strength material, its use in construction is expected to essentially be limited to single storey walls and ground floors [7]. Earthen masonry shows low values of strength in compression and in tension and a resulting general brittle failure [8]. Therefore, an improvement of the final behaviour may be reached adding cement to the soil material and obtaining stabilized earthen blocks. In the last decade several studies were carried to exploit the potentiality of cement stabilized earthen materials, as earth block masonry [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] or rammed earth [17][18][19][20][21]. Earthen blocks performance may be improved adding cement in the mixture; the use of …show more content…
It was demonstrated that the use of compressed and stabilized earth blocks (CSEBs) formed in a press from a soil mix with a small amount of cement (6%) as stabilizer ensures a higher structural resistance to extreme wind loads than traditional earthen blocks without cement. This result was mainly due to higher mechanical properties of stabilized blocks in terms of compressive strength and tensile strength. The limit of 6% wt cement was selected after noticing that increasing cement content to 9 wt% does not result in higher masonry compressive