Investigation of fibre reinforced mud brick as a building material

Most of the buildings in the rural areas are made out of limestone, low quality traditional concrete brick and adobe. But these materials do not have sufficiently high compressive strengths. In the present research, an earthquake-resistant material with high compressive strength has been sought. To this end, the mechanical properties of certain combinations of fibrous waste materials and some stabilisers were investigated thoroughly and some concrete conclusions were drawn. It was concluded that the interface layers of fibrous materials increased the compressive strength and a certain geometrical shape of these layer materials gave the best results. The mix proposed satisfies the minimum compressive strength requirements of ASTM and Turkish Standards. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.