FRACTURE ENERGY OF ILLITIC RAMMED EARTH WITH HIGH WATER-CLAY RATIO

Abstract

The article is focused on design of mixture of rammed earth, producing, testing and determination of fracture energy of unfired rammed earth and its stress-strain curve in tensile bending test. Three different mixtures of rammed earth were designed and tested. The amount of water and binder is one of the key properties of the rammed earth, the amount of the water is expressed by the water-clay ratio. Mechanical properties of the earth material highly depend on the composition of sand, clay and water. The prescription AGL III with 80 % of sand, 20 % of clay and 0.400 water-clay ratio reached the maximum value of fracture energy 4.858±0.002 J/m2 and set AGL V had the minimum value 1.934±0.310 J/m2.