Hello,
good in the first place I will introduce myself. I am Daniel Carcedo White, Technical Architecture student at IE University. As you can see this is a blog where all who have visited India to work with the Fundación Vicente Ferrer, their experiences in India without going too deeply into our field, architecture, making it accessible to any reader. In my case, and despite not being even in India, yes I am introducing my next trip, and mostly doing chores for what will be my thesis. In this part of my blog, I'll start describing the process a little research I am following for my experimental work, which I will detail next. This really will be something more technical than what I'm going to write on the other side of the blog, my trip to India.
For anyone who has the option to make your PFC in India, has to know that there is a part of experimental work. In this part, will have to focus their work on a topic of interest to delve into it. In my case, it is basically the study of the BTC, compressed earth blocks. By way of introduction we can say that is a block of a material similar to adobe but with differences.
To delve deeper into these blocks ...
is a block made with earth and a small amount of cement, approximately 10%, which once made the mix, it is covered with concrete tools for their manufacture, a pressure of about 100Kp/cm2. Then we can get a block whose maximum strength is reached within 700 days of their manufacture, and 75% of its strength maximum at 28 days. The standard dimensions of these blocks are 290x145x95. Its compressive strength is 71.8 kp/cm2. To give us an idea, a solid or perforated bricks, must have a minimum strength of 100 kp / cm 2. An important feature of this block is that singing is very fragile, so that transport and commissioning work are somewhat delicate.
As for finishes, you can use a mortar of the same features as the mortar, but can be left ever seen and when you run a special treatment and takes into account specific conditions.
then attached a link if you want to go deeper in their characteristics.
http://www.sostenibilidad-es.org/NR/rdonlyres/4C984435-A792-432E-A6CB-1D00D363C61E/2850/20080618norma_UNE_BTC.pdf
http://www.construtierra.org/documents/ BIOTERREFICHA.pdf