Abstract
This study provides a contribution to the research field of 3D-printed earthen buildings, focusing, for the first time, on the load-bearing capacity of these structures. The study involves the entire production and testing process of the earthen elements, from the design, to the preparation of the mixture and the 3D printing, up to the uniaxial compression test on a wall segment. The results indicate that 3D-printed earthen elements have a compressive strength of 2.32 MPa, comparable to that of rammed earth structures. The experimental data also made it possible to draw conclusions on the action of the infill, which seems to have the function of stopping the propagation of cracks. This has a positive effect on the overall behavior of 3D-printed earthen elements, since it avoids the onset of dilative behavior in the final stages of the load test and maintains ultimate load values higher than 50% of the maximum load.
Highlights
Earthen construction is one of the oldest and most widespread vernacular building techniques
The results indicate that 3D-printed earthen elements have a compressive strength of 2.32 MPa, comparable to that of rammed earth structures
This paper is part of the research on the 3D printing of earthen housing modules made with soil excavated in situ
Summary
Earthen construction (i.e., the construction of structural units manufactured from soil) is one of the oldest and most widespread vernacular building techniques. Detrimental to sustainability is the use of cement, as it leads to an increase in the embodied energy, carbon footprint and operational energy and reduces the potential for recyclability [10,37,38,39] This has led to a renewed interest in biostabilization techniques, such as the use of microbially induced calcite precipitation (MICP) [40,41,42], different types of biopolymers (for example, xanthan gum [43,44,45], gellan gum [46], agar gum [46], guar gum [47], modified starch [47] and carrageenan [48]) and biopolymer additives [49], in both the construction [50] and geotechnical [51,52,53,54] sectors. Since this was precisely the expected result that motivated the experimentation of [58], the RH used in the wall segment of this paper (printed on the same day as the casting of the [58] specimens) is shredded RH
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