Aref M. al-Swaidani, Lina Othman, Ayman Meziab  and Mulham Kharbotly

Researchers

Post Graduate Studies & Research Council Meeting No. 6, 16/5/2022

Date of Acceptance

Nowadays, there is an urgent search for ecological solutions to reduce the bad consequences of global warming. The earth architecture can be considered one of the most important of such solutions to partially or completely dispense with manufactured building materials, which include cement, whose industry is one of the most responsible industries for CO₂ emissions. Clay soils are widely spread in Syrian Arab Republic. However, earth clay as a building material has become as an urban heritage. Therefore, revival of such heritage needs a modern addition that may improve its positive properties and reduce its negative ones. Such negative properties can be summarized in the weak strength and the phenomena of swelling and shrinkage. This improvement is expected to be reached using the stabilizers that were adopted in this research which are extracted from natural and artificial sources. The latter is a by-product of olive pressing. The replacement levels of additives range from 0% to 15%. These percentages will be added to the earth clay mixtures, in order to investigate their effects on the properties of earth clay masonry. Atterberg limits, compaction, free swelling, swelling pressure, relative shrinkage, UCS and shear strength tests of the earth clay mixtures will be carried out before and after addition. A study of the microstructure (SEM, EDX, AFM) of earth clay mixtures will be conducted before and after addition to verify the formation of the expected cementitious materials.

Abstract