Performance of lateritic soil stabilized with combination of bone and palm bunch ash for sustainable building applications

Abstract

Affordable building for mass housing is the panacea for the housing deficit affecting the increasing population of the African continent especially Nigeria. Harnessing the abundant local building materials present in Africa is key for making adequate houses affordable for the populace. Lateritic soil is an earth-based building material (Jayasinghe & Kamaladasa, 2006) that is among the topmost available local building materials abundantly available in Nigeria and other tropical countries (Oluremi et al., 2012). Earth-based building materials are cheaper than cement and eco-friendly (Alam et al., 2015). Earth-based building materials are cheaper than cement because of the high embodied energy used for cement production. Unlike the cement, earth-based materials production do not release greenhouse gases to the environment and this makes them non-toxic and eco-friendly. The lateritic soil is composed mainly of quartz, iron–magnesium–manganese (amphibole group), and kaolinite (Egenti & Khatib, 2016). Soils having a ratio of silica to sesquioxide [SiO2/(Fe2O3 + Al2 O3)] which are less than 1.33 are classified as laterites whereas the ones between 1.33 and 2.00 are classified as lateritic soil, and those above 2.00 are classified as non-lateritic soils (Nnochiri & Adetayo, 2019). Lateritic soil can easily be recycled and that makes it a sustainable building material (Onakunle et al., 2020). However, due to their lower compressive strength, water absorption, and dimensional stability compared to cementitious materials, lateritic blocks are considered as non-durable building materials. A wide range of chemical stabilization techniques such as the use of cement, lime, agro-waste ash, and plastic waste has been investigated to improve the physical, chemical, and mechanical properties of earth-based materials (Apampa, 2017; Fadele & Ata, 2018; Hamada et al., 2020; Jamil et al., 2013; Moraes et al., 2019; Onyelowe, 2017a, 2017b; Rimal et al., 2019). The properties improved include compressive strength, water absorption, durability, ultrasonic pulse velocity, dry shrinkage, flexural strength, splitting tensile strength and workability.