Keywords

1 Introduction

Morocco's building sector is the second most energy-intensive sector, accounting for 33.6% of total final energy consumption (AMEE), resulting in the depletion of natural resources and major environmental problems like global climate change. Therefore, interest in alternative building materials like the earth has increased to satisfy environmental and economic demands. Earthen construction can take many forms like adobes, cob, CEB (Hubert Guillaud, 2015)… However, the disadvantage of earthen constructions is the low resistance to humidity, which is the subject of several researches (Abid et al., 2021).

Several pieces of research have focused on utilizing the waste mining generated by the phosphate (El Machi, 2020) industry. The present work is aimed at the valorization of the phosphate waste mine on manufacturing compacted earth blocks (CEB). The specimens were prepared from a mixture of waste rock, crushed sand, the filasse fiber. This later allows CEB to be prepared with high mechanical and physical characteristics and reduce the water absorption ratio.

2 Materials and Technical Methods

2.1 Identification of Materials

The materials used are waste rock, crushed sand, and filasse fiber. The properties of these starting materials were performed according to the characterization methods detailed by Ajouguim et al. (2020). The properties are shown in Tables 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Table 1 Compositions of the different formulations prepared
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Table 2 Physical characteristics of the earth
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Table 3 Chemical composition of the earth
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Table 4 Characteristics of the sand crashed
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The soil is intercalated clays generated in significant quantities by exploiting deposits located in El Youssoufia in Morocco, Fig. 1.

Fig. 1
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Visual aspect of the earth studied

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The sand used to prepare specimens is crushed sand (0/5). The physical characteristics are grouped in Table 3.

2.2 Preparation of the Specimens

Based on the specimen preparation methodology proposed by Ajouguim et al. (2020), mass percentages of filasse fiber and cement were used in the earth and crushed sand mixture to prepare CEB blocks. The compositions of the different formulations of CEB are shown in Table 1.

3 Results and Discussions

The mechanical and physical properties of the CEB blocks were performed according to the characterization methods detailed by Ajouguim et al. (2020). The mechanical and physical characterization of the CEB bricks prepared are shown in Table 5.

Table 5 Mechanical and physical characterization of CEB bricks
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The addition of the fibers led to an increase in compressive strength. This is due to the incorporation of the fibers in the composites, which will prevent the propagation of cracks.

The stabilization of the specimens by cement decreased the moisture content, Bruno et al. (2017) as well as an improvement in the behavior of the specimens with respect to capillarity, Fig. 2. which is a normal result because cement increases moisture resistance.

Fig. 2
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Results of water absorption by capillarity

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4 Conclusions

This work has shown the possibility of manufacturing CEB blocks using phosphate waste stabilized by cement and reinforced by filasse fibers. The obtained results allowed for getting interesting mechanical properties. However, the behavior of the porosity remains weak, which leads us to other studies to enhance the behavior of the CEB blocks in the presence of moisture and porosity.