Improving the properties of clay soil by using Literate soil for production of bricks

Abstract

Know a day’s utilization of local accessible materials is an important stage for sustainable, economic building material on the earth surface. Within them Brick is one of the commonly used construction material around Jimma town due to the availability of clay soil. It is not un-common to use locally produced brick for building houses and fences. But brick produced by small micros un-skill enterprises rather than by traditional method, its quantity was small and its quality was unsatisfactory, because it can easily break and it has high water absorbing behavior. Most of peoples uses this brick for beauty of outside of villa houses, partition wall only. The main objective of the study was be to improving the properties of clay soil properties by using Literate soil for in the manufacturing of bricks for masonry units. In order to achieve this researches include, non-probability sampling techniques was be used to collect samples in Jimma area, then collected of samples prepared for different laboratory test and by partially replacing literate soil by 5%, 10%, 15% and 20% on a clay soil in order to get optimum property by different mix ration for different laboratories such as compressive strength, water absorption, atterberg limits, linear shrinkage, density, efflorescent.l Test results indicated that shows that the lightweight bricks could be made from this study without any deterioration in the quality of bricks. Further, the compressive strength of the bricks was optimum at 15% lateritic soil replace in clay soil contents. The optimum firing temperature furnace at a duration burning of brick was at 1000°C. It is shown that bricks made of clay-laterite soil can be able to use in load bearing wall rather than for beauty.