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Civil-Comp Proceedings
ISSN 1759-3433
CCP: 106
PROCEEDINGS OF THE TWELFTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTATIONAL STRUCTURES TECHNOLOGY
Edited by:
Paper 112

Modelling the Structural Behaviour of Rammed Earth Components

R.A. Silva1, D.V. Oliveira1, L. Schueremans2, P.B. Lourenço1 and T. Miranda1

1ISISE, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal
2Department of Civil Engineering, KU Leuven, Frisomat, Belgium

Full Bibliographic Reference for this paper
, "Modelling the Structural Behaviour of Rammed Earth Components", in , (Editors), "Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Computational Structures Technology", Civil-Comp Press, Stirlingshire, UK, Paper 112, 2014. doi:10.4203/ccp.106.112
Keywords: rammed earth, modelling, shear behaviour..

Summary
The rammed earth technique has a significant presence in the earthen built heritage, where was used to build from simple dwellings to fortresses. However, the high vulnerability of rammed earth construction to decay agents and to seismic events puts at risk their further existence and the lives of millions of people. With respect to the seismic behaviour of rammed earth walls, the understanding and modelling of their shear behaviour are topics rarely approached in literature. Nevertheless, these topics are of significant importance in the preservation and strengthening of rammed earth constructions.

This paper presents experimental and numerical work where the shear behaviour of unstabilised rammed earth is analysed. The experimental program consisted in the testing of several unstabilised rammed earth wallets subject to diagonal compression, which allowed a better understanding of the shear behaviour of unstabilised rammed earth. The numerical work consists of the modelling, of the previous tests, using the finite element method and by considering both the macroand micro-modelling approaches. In general, the numerical models showed a good agreement with the experimental results.

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