Evaluation of the Compressive Strength of Ancient Clay Bricks Using Microdrilling
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 19, Issue 9
Abstract
Nondestructive testing techniques are increasingly being used to obtain the geometry of structural and nonstructural elements and hidden features such as voids, cracks, and detachments. However, the evaluation of the compressive strength and other mechanical properties of ancient materials using such techniques remains a challenge. To reliably assess mechanical properties, it is usually necessary to directly test the strength and deformation of materials by destructive methods. To avoid coring and sampling of the historic fabric, a recent minor-destructive methodology based in microdrilling is used in this paper for the characterization of clay brick. For this purpose, 148 brick specimens from the 12th to 19th centuries were collected from six monasteries in Portugal. A wide range of compressive strength was found by destructive compressive testing, ranging from . The paper shows that it is possible to reliably estimate the compressive strength of bricks by means of regression curves using the adopted microdrilling technique.
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Acknowledgments
The writers gratefully acknowledge the IPPAR (Instituto Português do Património Arquitectónico) for providing the old clay bricks used in the present work. The first writer acknowledges the partial funding of this work by the FCT through Scholarship No. UNSPECIFIEDPOCTI SFRH/BD/6409/2001.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 19 • Issue 9 • September 2007
Pages: 791 - 800
Copyright
© 2007 ASCE.
History
Received: Jan 4, 2006
Accepted: Jun 27, 2006
Published online: Sep 1, 2007
Published in print: Sep 2007
Notes
Note. Associate Editor: Kolluru V. Subramaniam
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