EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL ANALYSIS FOR EARTH STRUCTURES, FROM MATERIAL CONSTITUENTS TO MASONRY WALLS

Earthen construction is a vernacular building technique which adopts locally sourced materials and can provide an overall comfort of living. Despite earth being generally a weak structural material, it can offer an appealing solution for construction in terms of energy consumption and emissions. Reinforcement can be introduced in earthen structures to improve mechanical response of load bearing elements. It is therefore of interest to study its structural behaviour. In this paper a new building approach, developed in Senegal for reinforced earth walls, is presented. It is composed of concrete stabilised compressed earth block (CEB) and earth mortar. The blocks are moulded with hollows which allows a minimum reinforced concrete frame to be cast in them. The aim of this study is to analyse structural performance of constituent materials and contribution of reinforcement to masonry. Experimental tests have been carried out to identify mechanical properties of stabilised CEB and mortar (compressive strength, elastic modulus). Unreinforced and reinforced masonry walls have been tested in compression to investigate the contribution of the reinforcement frame. A homogenised FE model has been adopted to study the linear behaviour of the wall in compression, validated through experimental data.