Mechanical and environmental characterization of new and reclaimed brick for use in Canadian masonry construction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The number of freeze-thaw cycles is expected to grow with climate change in northern latitudes, prompting a growing emphasis on mitigation strategies in the masonry construction industry in Canada. While also addressing the stricter energy requirements in recent decades, masonry construction has seen a shift from traditional thick and solid masonry walls to energy-efficient ventilated cavity-walls, meant to promote drying and also improve the building’s energy efficiency. Despite these advancements, the growing environmental awareness movement of the 1970s has caused the rise in popularity of reclaimed brick used in modern construction, yet these bricks are more susceptible to freeze-thaw damage. Additionally, faulty construction of cavity-walls can still cause them to be vulnerable against freezing and thawing. Bricks used in modern Canadian construction must conform to the requirements of CSA A82:14 Fired masonry brick made from clay or shale, which includes several mandatory environmental and mechanical tests. However, past studies suggest that the performance of bricks in the field is inconsistent with laboratory test results. The CSA A82:14 durability requirements are unreliable, as bricks that have failed the laboratory tests have performed well in service and others that have passed have proven to be not durable. Also, it is unclear whether CSA A82:14 is applicable to reclaimed brick due to a conflicting clause in the NBCC Part 9. In this paper, the mechanical and environmental properties of eleven different bricks – both new and reclaimed – will be compared. These properties include freeze-thaw resistance, 24-h cold water absorption, 5-h boiling absorption, saturation coefficient, and compressive strength. Their compliance with CSA A82:14 will also be verified
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".