Performance of Non-fired Green Brick Containing Rice Husk as Sustainable Building Material

The demand for sustainable alternative construction materials to cement in modern technology cannotbe underemphasized. This paper presents a non-fired green brick with an agriculture residue namely,rice husk. Although, high plasticity brown clay deposits are widely distributed in Malaysia and ricehusk is a well known agriculture residue, research works on non-fired green brick with rice husk arerelatively scarce. This research aims to investigate the strength development in non-fired brickscontaining various amounts of rice husk. To achieve such aim, compression and flexural tests wereconducted to evaluate compressive and flexural strengths of non-fired bricks. A series of brickspecimens were cast with varying rice husk percentages. The test specimens were naturally sun dried.The effects of rice husk percentage (9-15%) and drying age (1, 7, 14, 21, and 28 days) on Atterberglimits; compressive strength; water absorption and flexural strength were investigated. The resultsindicate that, 12% rice husk is the optimum content to reach maximum 28-day compressive andflexural strengths of 10.4 MPa and 3.5 MPa, respectively. The results further showed that rice huskhigher than 12% leads lower strength than control bricks for all the ages. In summary, it has beenobserved that rice husk enables a rapid strength development, enhancing the compressive and flexuralstrengths of the bricks. The results developed in this research work can contribute a cost-effectivedesign of non-fired green brick as a sustainable building material.