Laboratory and Industrial Scale Unfired Clay Masonry Bricks Manufacture

Clay bricks are traditionally fired intensively, consuming high-energy supplies. Thus, developing unfired clay bricks of good engineering performance is novel and a significant achievement. The overall aim of this chapter is to report the possibility of manufacturing unfired clay masonry bricks at both laboratory and industrial scale. The laboratory-scale bricks were manufactured at the University of South wales, while industrial brick manufacture was carried out at two separate industrial trials, the first trial was carried out at Hanson Brick Company in Stewartby, Bedfordshire. The second industrial unfired clay brick manufature was carried out at PD Edenhall Ltd, Priory works, Ewenny, Bridgend, South Wales, UK. Limeactivated ground granulated blast-furnace slag and Portland cement activated slag was used to stabilise Lower Oxford Clay (LOC) for laboratory and industrial brick production. The engineering performance (strength) of the industrial-scale bricks (blended binder content around 7%) at the end of a 90-day moist curing period tends to be higher than that of the laboratory bricks (blended binder content of 13·1%). It was extremely difficult to make a thorough technical comparison of the overall engineering performance of the laboratory and industrial unfired clay masonry bricks owing to disparities in test methods, brick format (one solid and the other a frog brick) and mixing and compaction methods. The results suggest that there is potential for using unfired clay bricks for low–medium cost housing and energy efficient masonry wall construction