Producing Lightweight Foam Concrete Building Units Using Local Resources

Abstract

Brick is one of the most building units used in construction. Locally, this product suffer from many defects; technical, production, specification, and environment impact. Beside the inefficient quality control on the properties of produced building units that lead to negative effects on the overall construction processes. This research aims to produce sustainable alternative bricks using lightweight foam concrete made of local materials to substitute the traditional fired clay bricks. Lightweight foam concrete considered as new construction buildings materials used in construction sector in Iraq, it can produce from available local materials; Portland cement, fine sand, and foaming agent. Detailed information and data was derived from intensive experimental study and laboratory tests for the alternative brick units. Briefly; with density of (1200 to 2000 kg/m³) and brick size of (230*110*70 mm), lightweight foam concrete (LWFC) bricks were produced with properties can efficiently compete the fired clay bricks. The compressive strength was (4-45 MPa), water absorption (1-26%), thermal conductivity (0.10130-0.25375 w/k.m), and shrinkage (0.011-0.056%), with no efflorescence and very little tolerances in all dimension. these results show that there is a possibility for the use of LWFC units as construction units that can compete the fired clay bricks.

Keywords: Clay Brick, Lightweight foam concrete, Building units, Mechanical properties.