An engineered alternative brick masonry unit for the poor inhabitants at hawassa village, Ethiopia

Abstract

The traditional house construction pattern in the southern rural regions of Ethiopia is preferably constructed by means of "Chika-pet", which is the mud and wood construction technique, due to the poverty and low annual income of the inhabitants. "Chika" is a composite mixture of clay, teff straw and water, that is used as a gap filling material between the wooden frames and finally as a plaster. Due to the climatic uncertainties, this mud wall construction pattern experiences severe shortcomings such as wide crack formation in the walls, shrinkage, strength weakening, and prone to be eroded by rain which deteriorates the durability.*Author for correspondence Later on, to cope with these drawbacks the animal dung is used as a protective coating on the Chika-pet house walls. It further requires frequent maintenance and cost wise unaffordable by the inhabitants. Moreover, these houses require plenty of woods for the construction of walls and roofs which increases the cost and deforestation rate, hence these mud walls using soil is considered to be defective.Recently, the advancement of house construction in the southern regions of Ethiopia is upgraded by using bricks as the construction material. In current practice, the brick masonry units are made of a composition of soil and teff straw fibre, wherein the s oil is preferably collected from the far distance regions like Ziway, Alemtena and Meki. The negligence of their native southern region soil is due to its poor brick construction characteristics and hence this complicates Re search Article

Influence of consumer motivations and perception on the adoption of smart, green, and sustainable building materials

“…Such bricks saved labor and increased speed of construction (Tekpe et al, 2022). They are an environmental friendly alternative to traditional clay brick in sustainable construction (Daniel et al, 2021). These bricks do not need to be burned, which makes them a green and healthy building material.…”