The mudbrick wall remains preserved to date in the site of Eleusis are some of the largest preserved in Greece. Following an extensive investigation of the properties of existing mudbricks, material of similar properties from the archaeological site of Eleusis was used to reproduce mudbricks of similardensity with the ancient ones after drying with various concentrations of dry grass also from the archaeological site. Actual mudbricks were reproduced and brought to a final equilibrium condition under climatic conditions practically similar to those in Eleusis. Others were used to trim samples and measuremechanical properties to compare with original mudbricks, others were instrumented with suction and volumetric water content sensors in order to monitor mudbrick drying under climatic conditions and others in order to build small mudbrick walls with mortar from the same soil used to make the mudbricks. These small mudbrick walls included the mudbricks with internally installed suction and volumetric water content sensors and were also constructed with similar sensors in the mortar. This allowed monitoring of drying of the mortar until each whole mudbrick wall came to equilibrium and was then subjected to uniaxial compression under load control. Monitoring of mudbricks and mudbrick walls indicated that the higher the dry grass concentration, the higher the drying rate of the mudbricks; the lower the dry grass concentration the higher the probability of mudbrick cracking during drying; minimum required time for mudbrick and mudbrick wall drying for the particular soil used in the ancient mudbricks is not less than 5 weeks. Finally, uniaxial compression under load control on both samples trimmed from dried mudbricks and mudbrick walls indicated that uniaxial compression strength decreases with increasing dry grass concentration and mudbrick wall strength should be expected in the order of 70-80% that of the cubic samples trimmed from dried mudbricks and subjected to load rate control compression.
The paper presents the test results from the investigation of the nature and mechanical behaviour of mudbricks from the ancient mudbrick wall of Eleusis in Attica, Greece. The mudbrick wall remains preserved to date in the site of Eleusis are some of the largest preserved in Greece. Small fragments of mudbricks were taken to the laboratory for experimental investigation. Testing included index tests toclassify the soil material the mudbricks were made of, mineralogical analyses of their fines’ content, mechanical testing suitable for the nature of the materials and the ability to trim the samples without causing damage and measurements of suction on samples as they were obtained, further dried, or rewetted. The soil material used for ancient mudbrick construction was a silty sand to sandy silt with a small fraction clay content, with marginally plastic to non-plastic fines. Dry unit weight was found to be close to the dry unit weight of fresh mudbrick material after being compacted with a minimum compaction energy of only 45 kNm/m3 and left to dry to residual water content conditions. Similarly, field water content was found close to the residual water content of these recompacted soil samples. Consequently, unconfined compression strength was found very high corresponding to the residual water content condition, with similarly high cohesion obtained from direct shear tests and a very high yield stress under one-dimensional conditions of loading.
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