Behaviour of composite soil reinforced with natural fibres

Next to the food shortage, the housing shortage is one of the most crucial problems on earth. To improve this situation and make it possible to build more houses, particularly for low-income families, it is necessary to examine all locally available materials which can be used for construction. Bamboo, sisal and coconut fibres are materials which are available in abundance in Brazil and are not used in civil construction. To increase the amount of information concerning the physical and mechanical behaviour of these materials several research programmes were executed at Pontifical Universidade Catolica in Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and Universidade Federal da Paraiba (UFPb) under the general supervision of the first author. In this paper new results are presented concerning the application of sisal and coconut fibres in conjunction with three types of locally appropriate soil for the production of composite soil blocks reinforced with sisal and coconut fibres. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.