INVESTIGATING THE FEASIBILITY OF IMPROVING PROPERTIES AND STRUCTURAL PERFORMANCE OF ECO-FRIENDLY COMPRESSED EARTH BRICKS

This research aims to investigate the possibility of producing compressed earth bricks by utilizing a mixture of common available soil while enhancing its properties through the addition of a proportion of sand to meet Egyptian building specifications, while ensuring that the produced soil bricks are environmentally friendly. Additionally, the study examines the feasibility of incorporating brick hollows filled with grout to increase the overall brick compressive strength. The research also inspects the various failure patterns of the tested brick samples and determines the stress increments between the empty and filled brick hollows states. Furthermore, Numerical models were developed to represent different specimens of the brick prisms, allowing for the examination of their behavior under loading until failure, including the identification of failure modes. The experimental and numerical results demonstrate strong indicators that support the viability of utilizing the existing construction method for this type of brick to enhance its designed capacity beyond the current Egyptian specifications. Filling one hole of the brick with reinforced grout increased the efficiency of the prism by approximately 58%, and filling both holes with only just grout also increased the efficiency by approximately the same percentage. There is no point in filling both holes with reinforced grout because in this case the load depends directly on the reinforcement bars and not on the body of the prism. And The laboratory and analytical study achieved a compatibility exceeding 85%.