Abstract
Earthen construction has gained attention during the last decade because of its sustainability. Nevertheless, increasing its strength properties is still a challenge that is faced herein by including vegetal meshes with different coatings as internal reinforcement. An experimental campaign oriented to characterise the bending response of little scale earth beams in simply supported configuration was carried out including three different mesh materials (jute, hemp and cotton) and three different coatings (arabic gum, colophony and white glue). The results as failure mode, maximum load/stress and absorbed energy are presented and discussed. Results indicated that it is feasible to strengthen earthen materials with vegetal meshes. Colophony was too stiff to be combined with the chosen vegetal meshes with the goal of strengthening deformable earth. In addition, greater yarn thickness and smaller yarn separation were associated to premature debonding failure. Using cotton meshes with arabic gum coating brought the more promising results. In this case, the strength was slightly increased by 6 % but the absorbed energy was increased by 25 times respect to the control case.
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