Mix Proportion and Engineering Behavior of San-Ho-Tu Building Material for Temples and Ancestral Clan Houses

Abstract

The San-Ho-Tu building material is manufactured by adequately mixing a ternary mixture of sintered oyster shell ash, laterite and sand with water. It has been broadly used for construction and restoration of the ancestral temples and clan houses in China and Taiwan for hundreds of years due to its adequate engineering properties and easy availability of raw constituents. The main purpose of this study is aimed at understanding its engineering properties and proper mix proportioning. Cylindrical specimens of ϕ50 × 100 mm for nine sets of mixtures were cast, including three sets of traditional San-Ho-Tu building material (L-group), three sets of L-group mixtures with Portland cement (C-group) and three sets of single oyster ash paste an laterite paste (S-group). They were tested for compressive and tensile strengths at six ages of 7, 14, 21, 28, 56 and 90 days, respectively. Experimental results showed that at 90 days, the average compressive strengths of three specimens for S-group, L-group and M-group were 296.2, 2144.1 and 4915.4 kPa respectively. The ratios of the splitting tensile strengths to the corresponding compressive strength of San-Ho-Tu cylindrical specimens were between 16.1% and 19.9% which were higher than those of 10.0% and 14.0% for concrete cylinder made from the pure Portland cement paste.