ABSTRACT

Modern tendency is on the way to the search of local, efficient and economical material of construction. Baked clay is an environmental friendly, low cost and indigenous material of construction available in the plains of the Sindh. In order to replace traditional and costly material of construction i.e. concrete with economical material like baked clay, it is necessary to find its basic structural characteristics such as compressive strength, tensile strength, flexural strength and creep behavior . This study investigates the creep behavior of baked clay. Creep behavior of baked clay was evaluated by adopting standard testing method to find creep of concrete partially. ln this research, according to ASTM standards width to length ratio was taken as 1:11 where width of baked clay and cement mortar prisms of square cross section of 10 mm and 110 mm in length was· used. The baked clay prisms were placed vertically and tested in gravity loading testing frame under compression. ln this study baked clay showed negligible average creep value of only 0.0 \ 1 mm in the duration of loading of fifteen day test and no creep was found after 11th day of loading. On other hand, average creep value of cement mortar in 11 days was found to be the
0.029 mm in fifteen day test and the creep of mortar continued after eleventh day. Thus baked clay creep is only 38% of that of cement mortar prisms. It was concluded that baked clay was stronger than that of cement mortar in creep behavior and this may be due to the ceramic characteristic of baked clay.