Experimental investigation of long interlocking brick column subjected to eccentric load

Abstract

The Industrialized Building System (IBS) is referred as advanced construction technique which involved the prefabrication of construction components in controlled environment and then installed on site. It promotes faster, neater, safer, easier and cheaper construction works in future. Interlocking Brick (Blockwork System) is one of the IBS which has not commonly known in Malaysia. The key objectives of this research are to investigate the compressive strength of long interlocking brick column with cement mortar and SikaGrout®-215 filler under concentric and eccentric load, in addition to study its failure mechanism and compare the experimental result with existing design code. Four number of 2.3 -meter height column was built by using interlocking brick with Y12 steel bar and different filler and performed compressive strength test and the result is compare with the existing design code which is Eurocode 2 and BS 8110. From the research, Interlocking brick column with cement mortar filler had lower compressive strength capacity compare to column with SikaGrout®-215 under concentric and eccentric load. In term of failure mechanism, the column samples were failed by sudden crushing of interlocking brick. For column sample with grout, the percentage of difference of BS 8110 and Eurocode 2 modified equation compare to the experimental result is 10.20% and 12.56% respectively under concentric load. Moreover, for column sample with mortar infill, the percentage of difference is 67.16% for BS 8110 and 73.23% for Eurocode 2. For eccentric load, Eurocode 2 did not provide reasonable agreement where the percentage difference is range from 66.40% to 482.47%. The optimum design of interlocking brick column in this study is the column sample with SikaGrout®-215 as it has higher compressive strength compare to Type M cement mortar.