Strength Test And Seismic Behavior Research Of Innovative Earth Masonry

As a conventional green building,earth building is one of the sustainable architectural form.Raw soil has been used for centuries as a lowcarbon,low-cost and recyclable building material.Yet there are still many problems: low strength,poor durability and lack of standard to refer to.This paper focused on the loess stabilization,capacity of dry-stack masonry and numerical simulation of masonry.The main contents are:Firstly,Carboxymethyl cellulose(CMC)was introduced as an ecofriendly additive for soil stabilization for the first time.Loess was stabilized with different CMC proportion and compacted into cylinder specimens,of which physical and mechanical properties were tested,including optimum water content,maximum dry density,unconfined compressive strength and splitting tensile strength.Results showed that 1.0% or 1.5% CMC reduced the maximum dry density of specimens by about 5.3%,and the strengths are enough to construct low-rise buildings according to existing standards.SEM analysis was used to detect the influences on a microstructure scale and showed that CMC filled the voids of soil and connected soil particles.Then an innovative dry-stack block was proposed and manufactured using stabilized soil with 1.0% CMC.The compressive strength and splitting tensile strength of cubic specimens cut from blocks,and the compressive and shear strength of triplet masonry were test.Finally,a series of numerical models were built using ABAQUS to simulate more conditions out of experiments.All of the parameters of the standard model were set according to former experiments,and some parameters were set as variable to research the influence factors of shear strength of dry-stack masonry.Finally,the design formulas for shear strength was concluded.