Abstract
Rammed earth has the potential to reduce the carbon footprint and limit the energy consumption in the building sector due to its sustainable characteristics. Still, its use is not generalized due to a lack of understanding of the material behavior, notably its sensitivity to water. The coupled hydro-mechanical behavior has been recently studied in the framework of unsaturated soil mechanics, using suction as the parameter to represent the hydric state. This dependency of the mechanical behavior on the hydric state leads to uncertainty of the drying period required to progress in the construction process. Notably, the drying period before building the next floor is unknown. To determine the drying period, thermo-hydro-mechanical coupled finite element method simulations were carried out on a single wall by using the unsaturated soil mechanics approach and safety criterion recommendations from the practical guide for rammed earth construction in France. It was determined that it takes significant time for the construction of additional floor both in ‘summer-like’ and ‘winter-like’ environmental conditions, whereas the walls were far away from the ultimate failure state. Thus the drying periods were overestimated. It was concluded that the safety criterion from the practical guide is very conservative and drying periods can be reduced without significantly compromising the safety factor.
Highlights
Rammed earth is a construction technique by which dense load-bearing walls can be made with dynamic compaction of moist soil between removable shuttering
The numerical simulations on the drying and compression behavior of rammed earth walls were performed using CODE_BRIGHT (Olivella et al, 1996 [20]), which is a finite element 3-D program for the thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) coupled analysis in geological media. This code works in combination with the pre/post-processor GiD, which was developed by the International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE) at
A methodology was developed in order to determine the drying period required for the walls to gain enough strength in order to build the subsequent floor, which is an important practical issue in rammed earth construction
Summary
Rammed earth is a construction technique by which dense load-bearing walls can be made with dynamic compaction of moist soil between removable shuttering It is an ancient technique, but interest in it has been revived in the recent years due to its sustainable characteristics. A building made with rammed earth requires low operational energy due to its thermo and hygro-regulator effects [3,4,5] It is fully recyclable in its unstabilized state (i.e., without any additional binder). In France, the practical guide for construction using rammed earth is “Guide de bonnes pratiques (GBP) Pisé, 2018 [15]” It provides some recommendations for the drying period in different environmental conditions (3–4 months drying in summer-like conditions and not recommended to build in winter-like conditions), but there are no definitive regulations. A comparison of the results with the recommendations by GBP, Pisé, 2018 is made
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