Improving the Properties of Clay Soil by Using Laterite Soil for Production of Bricks

Nowadays, the utilization of locally accessible materials is a crucial stage for sustainable, economical building material on the earth’s surface. Within them, brick is one of the commonly used construction materials around Jimma town due to the availability of clayed soil. Nevertheless, brick produced by small micros unskilled enterprises rather than by traditional methods, its quantity was small, and its quality was unsatisfactory because it can easily break, and it has high water-absorbing conduct. The purpose of the investigation was to improve the properties of clayed soil properties by using laterite soil for the manufacturing of bricks for masonry units. In order to achieve this, research used non-probability sampling techniques to collect samples in Jimma area. Then, the collected samples prepared for different laboratory tests and by partially replacing literate soil by 5 %, 10 %, 15 % and 20 % on a clayed soil in order to get optimum property by different mix ratio for different laboratory tests results indicated showed that the lightweight bricks could be made from the approach of this study without any deterioration in the quality of bricks.

Additionally, the compressive strength of the blocks optimum at 15 % lateritic soil replaces in clayed soil contents. The optimum firing temperature furnace at a duration burning of brick was at 1000 °C for 5hrs. It has shown that bricks prepared of clay-laterite earth capable of high resisting capacity rather than for beauty.