Abstract
The brick industry is currently facing a shortage of natural resources. Despite this, the demand for construction bricks is progressively increasing. Alternative materials, such as dredged sediments and solid organic waste, have been recently proposed as options to replace natural clay in brick manufacturing. Potential exploitation of dredged sediments in clay bricks is evaluated in this study. The chemical composition of the mixtures and the opto-thermal properties of brick samples, which differed for the dredged sediment content (from 10% to 50% of the clay weight), were investigated. Chemical analyses detected lower concentrations of heavy metals in bricks incorporating dredged sediments (DS). Negligible variations in thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity, and specific heat were observed by increasing the amount of DS in the mixture. In particular, the thermal conductivity values ranged between 0.45 ± 0.03 W m−1 K−1 (DS-50) and 0.50 ± 0.03 W m−1 K−1 (DS-30). Conversely, the color shift value and spectral reflectance in the infrared field were found directly proportional to the concentration of DS. Using dredged sediments as building material demonstrated to be a solution to the problem of their disposal and the scarcity of raw materials, reducing the global warming score by up to 2.8%.
Highlights
Up to 18 factors were assessed by excluding long-term emissions: global warming (GW), stratospheric ozone depletion (OD), ionizing radiation (IR), ozone formation human health (OFHH ), fine particulate matter formation (PM), ozone formation, terrestrial ecosystems (OFTE ), terrestrial acidification (TA), freshwater eutrophication (FEut), marine eutrophication (MEut), terrestrial ecotoxicity (TEcot), freshwater ecotoxicity (FEcot), marine ecotoxicity (MEcot), human carcinogenic toxicity (HCT), human non-carcinogenic toxicity (HN- CT), land use (LU), mineral resource scarcity (MRS), fossil resource scarcity (FRS), water consumption (W)
as 24.1 ppm (As) comparative analysis of their opto-thermal properties was performed against a conventional clay brick
dredged sediments (DS)-10 was the sample with the lowest concentration of heavy metals, the highest corresponded to the DS-0; Thermal conductivity of the four specimens varied between 0.45 ± 0.03 W m−1 K−1 (DS-50) and 0.50 ± 0.03 W m−1 K−1 (DS-30); Color shift value was directly proportional to DS’ content, the highest value (5.88) was calculated for DS-50; An increment of, approximately, 5% in spectral reflectivity could be achieved in the infrared range by substituting half of the natural clay (NC) in bricks with DS; GW score reduction ranged between 0.6% (DS-10) and 2.8% (DS-50), while the greatest impact reductions were observed in ecotoxicity-related categories
Summary
Mattia Manni 1,2, * , Fabiana Frota de Albuquerque Landi 2 , Tommaso Giannoni 2 , Alessandro Petrozzi 2 , Andrea Nicolini 2,3 and Franco Cotana 2,3. Sustainable Heritage Conservation Centre, University for Foreigners of Perugia, 06125 Perugia, Italy
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