Strength and stress–strain characteristics of traditional adobe block and masonry

Abstract

Traditional unstabilized adobe low-rise buildings are common in many Chinese small towns and villages. This paper presents a study on the uniaxial compressive strength and stress–strain behavior of traditional unstabilized adobe blocks and masonry prisms with various compositions. The adobe blocks were manually produced by Chinese traditional technique in various proportions of natural soil and sand. The influence of various proportions on unconfined compressive strength, dry density and initial tangent modulus are discussed. Following this, soil mortars in three different proportions were used to construct adobe masonry prisms, with the purposes of understanding the influence of mortar strength to block strength ratio on compressive strength and stress–strain characteristics. The result shows that the compressive strength, initial tangent modulus and Poisson’s ratio of prism are influenced by the ratio of mortar strength to block strength. In addition, tangent modulus and Poisson’s ratio increase with the ratio of stress to peak strength. It was also found that although coefficients of variation of experimental results are reduced by load–unload cycles, peak strains are largely increased.