NUMERICAL MODELING OF THE SEISMIC RESPONSE OF ADOBE HOUSES PROTECTED WITH USED CAR TYRE STRAPS

Earth is one of the most ancient building materials, and has been used by many to build their own houses by themselves for centuries, because is readily available at little or no cost. Such people, however, often live in high seismic hazard zones, and earth is a fragile material, with almost no tensile strength. Consequently, Adobe houses can suffer severe damage or collapse due to earthquakes, leading to considerable economic loss, injuries and deaths. The purpose of this paper is to support adoption of car tyre straps as a means to ameliorate deficiencies of Adobe buildings. The use of this reinforcing technique satisfies at the same time two interesting requirements: on the one hand, low-income people in developing countries need almost-no-cost reinforcement techniques to succeed in improving the safety of their houses, and spent car tyre can represent one of such low-cost techniques. On the other hand, by using spent car tyre, the huge environmental issue of waste disposal is exploited as a resource, and no more as a burden. Some initial experimentation with used car tyre straps has already been done, and the results were very encouraging. On this base, in the present work numerical modeling of full Adobe buildings is carried out to assess the effectiveness of used car tyre straps as an efficient reinforcement for Adobe houses.