Performance Evaluation of Red Clay Binder with Epoxy Emulsion for Autonomous Rammed Earth Construction.

Jinsung Kim,Keun-Byoung Yoon,Hyeonggil Choi,Dong-Eun Lee

doi:10.3390/polym12092050

Abstract

Existing rammed earth construction methods have disadvantages such as increased initial costs for manufacturing the large formwork and increased labor costs owing to the labor-intensive construction techniques involved. To address the limitations of the existing rammed earth construction methods, an autonomous rammed earth construction method was introduced herein. When constructing an autonomous rammed-earth construction method, an alternative means of assuring the performance at the initial age of the binder in terms of materials is needed. In this study, in order to satisfy the performance of the red clay binder, epoxy emulsion was added to analyze the compressive strength, water loosening, shrinkage, rate of mass change, and microstructure in the range of the initial age. As a result of the analysis, the applicability of the epoxy emulsion was confirmed as a new additive for application to an autonomous rammed-earth construction method.

Highlights

Earth buildings utilize soil as their primary material, allowing these buildings to reflect the characteristics of the soil itself
Rammed earth construction mainly uses red clay as the primary material, and red clay consists of silt with a diameter of 0.002–0.005 mm in the classification according to the particle size distribution of the soil [8,9]
The compressive strength of th PE specimens was substantially high ompared with that of the RP and RPC specimens. This is attributed to the curing mechanisms of the epoxy an cumulative porosity and pore diameter of the samples were measured based on the amount of intrusion ardener in the epoxy emulsion

Summary

Introduction

Earth buildings utilize soil as their primary material, allowing these buildings to reflect the characteristics of the soil itself. In rammed earth construction, wood or iron is used to fabricate an integrated formwork into which soil is placed; this form is rammed with a 7–10 kg rammer to form an integrated wall or floor. This is currently the most commonly used construction method in many regions [5,6,7]. In terms of the physical property standards for rammed earth construction, ACP-EEC(African, Caribbean and Pacific-European Economic Community) requires a compressive strength of 2.4 MPa after 28 d of curing, while the New Mexico Adobe and Rammed earth Building

Methods

Results

Conclusion