Low Cost Housing in Egypt by Using Stabilized Soil Bricks

Residential housing is one of the major priorities in Egypt. The cost of apartment in different regions can charge the person over budget money and per disability of people the slums appears with uncivilized environment. Construction material like cement consumes a lot of energy to produce final product which make an additional burden on state economy. This paper presents a simple technique to build low-cost housing by using new materials abundantly available in nature with low cost to improve sustainability and green energy. The compressive strength of compressed stabilized earth building bricks depends upon the soil type, amount of stabilizer and the compaction pressure used to form the bricks with dimension of 25x12x6cm. Experimental program was carried out on specimens and seven tests were applied. Each test consists of five masonry prisms assemblage cast with stabilized bricks. These tests are compressive strength, shear strength, in-plane tensile strength, and flexural tensile strength. The results are encouraging and promising to use these bricks in green constructions as low cost housing and national projects. A comparative study approved the cost effectiveness of using the stabilized bricks, as a load bearing wall system, instead of using the traditional skeleton structures by about 34% in case of one story building.