Design of a new soil concrete as an eco-material: Effect of clay and hemp fibers proportions

Abstract

This study presents a series of soil concrete mix that is made of excavated soils, cement, lime and hemp fibers. An experimental program was carried out on the testing samples of soil concrete with different proportions of clayey soil and hemp fibers. This program focus on several properties of soil concrete, such as compressive strength, autogenous shrinkage, drying shrinkage and water mass loss with time. The obtained results show that the compressive strength of soil concrete increases even after 28 days, and can be reduced significantly with increasing the proportion of clayey soil. The effect of clayey soil on the properties tested of soil concrete is more than that of hemp fibers. In addition, drying shrinkage associated with water mass loss allows to describe the drying process of soil concrete.
 Keywords:
 soil concrete; hemp fibers; compressive strength; autogenous shrinkage; drying shrinkage; water mass loss.