The mechanical characteristics of on-site manufactured compressed earth blocks: the effects of water repellent and other additives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The compressed earth block (CEB) is a form of masonry unit comprised of mechanically compacted earth with a natural clay binder. CEBs typically experience a 50% reduction in compressive strength when saturated. As a result, CEBs are typically stabilised with Portland cement, hydrated lime, or metakaolin. More recently, a commercial silane/siloxane water-repellent admixture with the tradename Plasticure, specifically designed for earth construction, has become available. This paper is an experimental investigation of the influence of Plasticure on the dry and wet strengths of CEBs stabilised with Portland cement, hydrated lime, and metakaolin. Prisms were tested wet and dry with three repetitions each. In total, 106 specimens were tested. The wet specimens were soaked in water for 24 h before compressive testing. Typical CEBs without Plasticure absorbed water equal to 7 to 9% of their original weight. This resulted in reductions of compressive strengths from the dry condition by 40 to 50%. For CEBs that are only stabilised with cement, the addition of Plasticure reduces the amount of water absorbed by 61 to 81% and also reduces moisture-based strength loss by 34 to 71% after 24 h of submersion; this reduces the strength range between dry and wet CEBs drastically. Long-term submersion of cement-stabilised Plasticure specimens (40 days) results in a water absorption of 60% of the absorption measured for CEBs without Plasticure. However, the wet strength is similar to the wet strength of CEBs without Plasticure that are submerged for 24 h. Despite the reduction in strength, all the measured wet compressive strengths exceeded the requirements outlined by Australian, New Mexican and ICC design standards.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".