Abstract
From a sustainability point of view, laterites-compressed earth bricks (LCEB) are a promising substitute for building structures in place of the conventional concrete masonry units. On the other hand, techniques for identifying and classifying laterites soil for compressed earth bricks (CEB) production are still relying on direct human expertise or ‘experts’. Human experts exploit direct visual inspection and other basic senses such as smelling, touching or nibbling to generate a form of binomial classification, i.e. suitable or unsuitable. The source of predictive power is otherwise supposed to be found in color, scent, texture or combinations of these. Lack of clarity regarding the actual method and the possible explanatory mechanisms lead to 1) difficulties to train other people into the skills and 2) might also add to apathy to using CEB masonry units for housing. Here we systematize the selection method of experts. We chose imaging analysis techniques based on 1) easiness in image acquisition (Digital Camera) and 2) availability of machine learning and statistical techniques. We find that most of the predictive power of the ‘expert’ can be packed into visual inspection by demonstrating that with image analysis alone we get a 98% match. This makes it practically unnecessary the study of any other ‘expert’ skills and provides a method to alleviate the housing problems dealing with material construction in the developing world.
Highlights
Meeting the housing need of the expanding human population, especially in the developing economies, with the current building technology is prohibitively expensive but environmentally unsustainable
For robustness and in order to account for cost, we quantify the suitability of any laterite by the relative material cost used in producing CEB masonry units (CCEB) from the laterite compared to the material cost in producing a concrete masonry unit (CCMU) of equivalent strength
The housing problem in the developing world is concerning because of the lack of “de facto” investment in the development of methods, research of materials and infrastructure and other similar technicalities, and because of the lack of research resources allocated to solving the problem practically rather than conceptually only
Summary
Meeting the housing need of the expanding human population, especially in the developing economies, with the current building technology (concrete masonry unit) is prohibitively expensive but environmentally unsustainable. Some authors tried addressing these in consistencies by classifying laterites based on the parent material, the degree of weathering or by exploiting commonly employed engineering classification systems Such efforts have found little accep tance in the soil engineering community presumably because of lack of reproducibility due to perturbations to properties during testing, amongst other [9,12,13,14,15]. In addition to the core articles referenced, there are several studies in the literature (both published and unpub lished) targeted at addressing the localized problem of laterites classi fication for engineering use in restricted areas Results from such studies are usually incomplete and tend to have conflicting viewpoints [12,16]. According to the ARS 680:1996 (Compressed earth blocks - code of practice for the production of compressed earth blocks) [17], it is recommended that soil selection techniques should either be based on the user’s empirical knowledge or a set of laboratory tests procedures
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