Experimental and analytical study on coconut in filled concrete blocks

Abstract

Homelessness in India has been a problem for centuries and it is very essential to the engineering community to rehabilitate the people’s economic and social state in a safe manner. Further the scarcity of natural resources, alarms to invent alternate technologies to overcome the related issues. In particular, the clay bricks are developed from high fertile clay which is important for the cultivation and the process of burning requires wood for firing which become the adverse effect on the environment and societal development. This creates the ecological imbalance which necessitates for developing innovative technologies to utilize the wastes by-product from the industry and the renewable natural resources. Also, the demand for lightweight stabilized soilconcrete blocks for load bearing and non-load bearing walls are increasing rapidly. In view of this, the present study attempted to develop a technology to utilize the waste coconut inner portion for the construction. The coconut inner portion has its own advantageous in the form of shell and the present study performed to explore its effectiveness for the development of light weight concrete blocks. A pair of bare hemispherical coconut shells are kept together to form a closed shell and infilled in to the concrete blocks. The coconut infilled blocks have been casted, cured and tested under compression at 7th, 14th and 28th day. A nonlinear finite element analysis is carried out for the comparison. Both material and geometrical nonlinearity were included in the nonlinear analysis. The analytical results were compared with the experimental result. The maximum load carrying capacity, displacement, strain was determined and compared. The results were seeming to be comparable and the results indicates that the shell action of coconut shell influences the behaviour of light weight concrete blocks.