Experimental investigation on assessment of lateral strength of earthen wall blocks in adobe houses: Fid-Bau Portal

Experimental investigation on assessment of lateral strength of earthen wall blocks in adobe houses

Sen, Bipul / Saha, Ayan / Saha, Rajib

Earthen houses are recognized to be the preferred choice of living for lower economic groups of people in most of the developing and underdeveloped countries. The reason behind this involves several factors such as ease of availability of local materials, economic and environmental-friendly construction, simplified construction methodology, and comfort of living during various weathered condition, etc. Though such houses are built of green material with a low carbon footprint, they are highly vulnerable to natural calamities such as cyclones, storms, floods, and specifically earthquakes. Most of the failures were experienced in unreinforced load-bearing earthen walls during past major earthquakes. In this context, the present study is an endeavor to investigate the influence of locally available reinforcing materials such as jute, lime, cement, and bamboo, respectively on the shear strength response of model soil blocks. Both experimental and numerical large scaled direct shear tests are performed to estimate the approximate shear strength response of unreinforced and reinforced soil blocks. Results confirm the better performance of the bamboo reinforced soil model relative to the other reinforcing materials. Further, a unidirectional shake table test is also performed on model scaled unreinforced and bamboo reinforced earthen houses to verify the improvement observed in the direct shear tests. A similar observation in terms of enhancement in stress resistance for bamboo reinforced model is noticed. Finally, the nonlinear dynamic analysis of prototype unreinforced and bamboo reinforced mud walls using ABAQUS/CAE 6.08 (2008) is also performed which offers reasonably good support to the shake table results.