Structural behavior of load bearing brick walls of soil-cement with the addition of ground ceramic waste

Abstract

An experimental study of three load bearing walls is presented and discussed in this paper. The walls were of soil-cement bricks made with three different material proportions, in which two of them had part of the cement amount replaced by crushed ceramic waste. The walls were 95.20 cm high, 75.32 cm wide and 12.56 cm thick and had their bricks layered with cement paste. The walls were tested under compression and their displacements were measured with 5 dial gages. The walls had satisfactory behaviour and their strengths were suitable as required by Brazilian popular houses. The differences between the brick strength and the wall strength were less than 20%. A finite element analysis (FEA) was performed and the uniformity of the compressive stress distributions in the walls was evaluated. Finally, it was observed that the partial replacement of the cement by crushed ceramic waste is possible.