Experimental Study On Compressive Strength Of Modified Adobe Masonry

Earth architecture, which dates back to 8000 B.C, is widely used all over the world, traditionally across Latin America, Africa, Indian subcontinent and other parts of Asia, Middle East and Southern Europe. Around 30% of the world's population lives in earth-made construction, approximately 50% of the population in developing countries. Earth architecture also has a long history in our country, the Banpo & Longshan historic sites thousands of years ago proved our ancestor could construct their dwellings by rammed earth. At present, an amount of earth building exist in urban and suburban regions, especially in south Xinjiang, where the earthquakes take place frequently, few could meet the details of seismic design listed by national codes. As a result, a lot of damage caused by earthquake time and time again. So how to make earth building stand earthquake is an urgent problem to be solved. In 2008 the investigation organized by the autonomous region government showed dangerous situation of earth building changed unobviously. The poor construction quality and lack of non-specific design leads to poor seismic performance. There is evidence that adobe house designed reasonably could keep its integrity and safety under intensityâ…§. Because of its oecological features, with the current ecological civilization and region culture situation ,namely the energy crisis, ecological crisis, sustainable development strategy, Earth Architecture Association was founded by programming master RenZhenying in 1980,from then on ,researches on earth building became more systemically, a new life was given to earth building. The paper focuses on seismic performance and strengthening technique of vegetal fiber reinforced adobe wall. By searching and collecting correlative references home and abroad, the development situation of earth building is introduced in detail. A series of mechanical experiments about raw-soil material, cubes with different size and stabilizers, adobe, adobe masonry specimens are carried out. The factors affect strength and deformation capability of specimens was analyzed and the optimum ratio of additives was recommended. Based on experimental load-displace curves, uniaxial constitutive relations of modified raw-soil materials and adobe masonry were proposed. Part of experiment was simulated by Ansys 10.0 edition, the numerical results accorded with experiment by and large. Aiming at the seismic vulnerability, some improving measures were proposed. At the same time, reliability analysis on vertical loaded bearing wall was studied. At the end of this paper, some conclusions and problems to be solved during the research were listed.