Effect of different stabilization materials on physical and mechanical properties of rammed earth walls

Alternative construction techniques have been searched based on increasing the importance of the green building. All over the world, various building designs have been seen produced with a variety of environmentally friendly building materials such as rammed earth wall construction. Rammed earth wall which is produced as compacting the mixture of certain amount of clay, aggregate and water layer by layer in the mold, is green, renewable, healthy and economic production technique. In our country, although buildings constructed with similar techniques to rammed earth in terms of materials and/or production techniques such as adobe and half-timbered construction have been seen, rammed earth walls have different mechanical and durability characteristics compared to them. Also, rammed earth walls have showed better performance on health, energy efficiency and environmental sensitivity compared to alternative structural wall systems. In this study, suitable clay / sand ratio have been determined as preparing different clay/sand ratio samples considering unit weight and compressive strength criteria. Then, standard proctor test has been used to determine the optimum water content at maximum dry density. Afterwards compressive strength, unit weight, flexural strength, ultrasonic pulse velocity, the resonance frequency experiments will be made on 15x30 cm cylinder and 10x10x50 cm prism stabilized rammed earth samples. The mixtures that show the best test results will be evaluated. As a result, it was identified that dry density of all rammed earth walls are lower than 2.05 gr/cm³; all rammed earth walls stabilized with cement, cement-dolomite, cement-blast furnace slag meet the requirement of minimum 5 MPa compressive strength according to earthquake regulations of Turkey on masonry construction systems, results of the ultrasonic pulse velocity and the resonance frequency tests show compatibility with the data obtained from compressive strength test and also, rammed earth walls reinforced with 10% cement-0.5% glass fiber and 10% cement-1% glass fiber have the highest performance in terms of physical and mechanical properties.