Compressive Strength Performance of Composite Sand Cement Brick with Power Saw Wood

Abstract Malaysia is experiencing an unprecedented growth of its urban centre due to its developing economy and industrialization, causing the demand of bricks production to be high. This increased the price of river sand. Further, the river sand may be depleted in the future if there is no alternative taken in reducing the usage of river sand in building materials due to the limited natural resources supply. Therefore, this research concentrates on using waste material like wood fiber waste (WFW) in order to reduce river sand in the fabrication of composite sand cement brick. This research is done in order to determine the water absorption and the compressive strength of sand cement brick with powder saw wood. Six batches of bricks were made with different composition of sawdust of 0%, 1%, 2%, 3%, 4% and 5% sawdust. All the bricks undergo 7 days of air-cured process before having the water absorption test and compression test. 3 days of water-cured process was performed on all bricks in order to investigate the results of water absorption test. For water absorption test, 0% of sawdust brick shows the lowest value while 5% of sawdust brick shows the highest value of water absorption rate. This indicated that high percentages of sawdust in composite brick will results in higher water absorption rate. This factor is due to the sawdust that is hydrophilic and porous in nature that causes the brick to containe more air space in the brick. Thus, this can be evidenced by the density data that keep decreasing with increasing percentages of sawdust. As for compressive strength test, the results presented 0%, 1%, 2%, 3%, 4% and 5% of sawdust have strength of 20.61 MPa, 25.30 MPa, 15.47 MPa, 2.03 MPa, 1.49 MPa and 1.73 MPa respectively. In summary, it can be concluded that optimum percentage of sawdust is 2% as it contains better compressive strength than other bricks although it has slightly higher water absorption rate than conventional sand cement brick. The compressive strength was influenced by the density of brick. It is shown in density results that decreasing in density will causes declining in compressive strength. As a conclusion, water absorption rate increases linearly proportional to the percentages of sawdust but inversely proportional to the compressive strength and the density of the brick.