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

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Date
2021Author
Ijeoma Obianyo, Ifeyinwa
Aboubakar Mahamat, Assia
Nneka Anosike-Francis, Esther
Tido Tiwa, Stanislas
Geng, Yang
Chibuzor Onyelowe, Kennedy
Odusanya, Shola
Peter Onwualu, Azikiwe
Soboyejo, Alfred B. O.
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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.