Influence of interlayer shear studs on the behaviour of cement stabilised rammed earth under compression, tension and shear

Cement stabilised rammed earth (CSRE) has been used for the construction buildings since the last 6-7 decades across the world (Australia, Europe, Asia, Africa, and countries such as New Zealand and the United States). The rammed earth is a monolithic construction, where the processed earth is compacted in layers. The interfacial bond strength between the compacted layers is weak, and hence there is a weak link among the compacted layers of CSRE. The major issues with CSRE walls are (1) catastrophic shear failures under compression and shear and (2) poor flexure and shear strength. Introducing short shear studs at the interfaces of the compacted rammed earth layers is one possibility to enhance the shear and the flexure strength of the CSRE. The paper focuses on evaluating the compressive strength, interface shear strength, shear stress shear strain relationships, and the flexural strength of steel studs embedded CSRE for the first time. The results reveal that due to the introduction of shear studs, (a) the interfacial shear strength and diagonal shear strength of CSRE improved significantly, (b) The ultimate moment resisting capacity doubles and (c) the steel studs embedded CSRE wallette showed ductile failure. The results clearly demonstrated that introducing steel studs among the compacted layers of CSRE could help avoid sudden catastrophic failures of CSRE walls under out of plane bending.

Automated summary

The paper investigates the performance of steel studs embedded cement stabilised rammed earth (CSRE) in terms of compression, shear, and flexure. The results show that the introduction of shear studs significantly improves the shear and flexural strength of CSRE, and helps prevent catastrophic failures.