Stone

Stone has been used as a building material for thousands of years. It is a beautiful natural material that can be used for floors, walls, arches and roofs. Besides, it has also recognised as a material of great durable, low maintenance and with high thermal mass. It is a generic available in many shapes, sizes, colours and textures, and Stone blends well with the natural landscape, and can easily be recycled for other building purposes. Therefore, it can provide environmental friendly.

Type of stone

Sandstone

Sandstone is the most common types of stone used for build houses. Sandstone consists of several types of small grains of minerals including quartz, calcite and feldspar. The stones are usually in gray, brown, red, green or cream colour. The sandstone layer may contain natural gas and petroleum, and are common aquifers. Sandstone is quarry for building, and crushed for aggregate.

Limestone

Humans have been building with limestone for thousands of years. The use of lime is in steel manufacturing. Where the lime is used as a flux  to remove impurities such as phosphorus and sulphur. To remove sulphur from the emissions, lime is used in power plant smokestacks . It is used in road construction and traditional building construction. Besides, Limestone is a porous rock that carves easily, making it ideal for building. The stone colour is often gray, off-white or cream, and it is almost every colour of the stone exists.

Slate

·        Slate can be made into roofing slates. It consists of small grains of mica and quartz. Slate is an ideal stone for building houses because it is weatherproof and last longer. Slate has a dull appearance in a dark gray colour, but it can range from brown to green depending on the stone's origin. Furthermore, a very small amount of slate is crushed and used for road construction, concrete mixes and other construction purposes. It is more expensive to import other crushed stone products such as limestone or granite. Therefore, it is used locally. For centuries it has been used for roofing and for pavement stones around homes, buildings and gardens. The same feature made slate a most suitable material for making pool table tops.

Granite

·          Granite is an intrusive igneous rock. Intrusions are bodies of igneous rock that result from crystallisation of magma deep underground. Slow cooling at depth in the Earth produces larger crystals that can easily be seen by the naked eye.Granite is commonly used on kitchen counter tops as the stone is both scratch and heat resistant. However, granite is also ideal for building homes as well. Granite is one of the toughest and durable stones available. It consists of quartz, alkali feldspar and plagioclase feldspar. Granite  is generally light coloured in shades of white, grey, or pink. But the addition of other minerals can add more colour dimensions, so that it can making each piece of granite unique.

Eco-Bricks

Bricks made with wool. 
(Credit: Galán-Marín et al.)

Today, the researchers in Europe have created a new brick that is stronger and more environmentally friendly. According to the study published in the year 2010 in the journal Construction and Building Materials, Spanish and Scottish researchers have added wool fibers to the clay material used to make bricks and combine these with a natural polymer which is extracted from seaweed called alginate.


"The objective was to produce bricks reinforced with wool and to obtain a composite that was more sustainable, non-toxic, using abundant local materials, and that would mechanically improve the brick strength," Carmen Galán and Carlos Rivera, authors of the study and researchers at the Schools of Architecture at the University of Seville in Spain and the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK said about their invention.

Wool and an alginate conglomerate from the cell walls of seaweed were mixed with clay to create the bricks. The mixture seemed to be less easy to crack and less likely to wrap. For your information, these kinds of bricks can be manufactured without firing, which directly contributes to energy conservation. According to the authors; "This is a more sustainable and healthy alternative to conventional building materials such as baked earth bricks and concrete blocks."

Via Science Daily
   

          

Bricks

Bricks are hard rectangular blocks typically made of clay and water, they are arranged or laid in rows and columns to construct building structures. There are various types of bricks depending on their properties or special features in the construction process.

How Bricks are made

3 Common Shape of Bricks

Frogged Brick

Brick with this shape possess an small and indented rectangular pit on top of the brick. This kind of bricks usually be laid with the pit at the top so that the load is spread equally across the width of the brick, not just across the edges.

Perforated Brick

Perforated brick possess a holes through top to bottom. The objective of the holes is to decrease the weight of the brick and provide air gap for insulation purpose. 

Solid Brick

As shown in the figure above, solid brick is flat in all six sides,hence it is a perfect rectangular block.

Bricks With Different Functions

Building Bricks

Building bricks are mainly used to provide support or act as filler for construction structure instead of provide aesthetic look.

Engineering Bricks

Engineering bricks are tough, strong and long-lasting. They possess damp or water resistance, this property makes them suitable for tough construction such as sewers and retaining walls. Unfortunately, this type of brick is not a good looker.

Common Bricks

This type of bricks is cheap, filler bricks that are used where are unseen, thus their profile is not important. However, they can be used as facing bricks if you do not worried about looks as they have lower cost than facing bricks.

Facing Bricks

Facing bricks have aesthetic view and they are usually used externally. The most visible part of the building is cover by them.

Stock Bricks

Stock Bricks have a slightly irregular shape made by using a mechanised moulding process which is called soft mud moulding. A variety of colours are available. In terms of price, as well as style, stock bricks fall between the wirecut bricks and the handmade bricks. 

Wirecut Bricks

Wirecut Facing Bricks are made by extrusion of a continuous column of clay which is cut by the wire but not before the column has been textured. They are to adapt in almost every type of application and are available in a variety of colours and textures. Besides, the highly automated production process makes wirecuts bricks is relatively inexpensive compared to some other types of brick.

Handmade Bricks

Handmade Bricks are made manually by skilled craftsmen pouring clay into moulds. Every single brick is unique and they have a nice and attractive appearance with a creased face as well as longstanding durability.

Standard Special Bricks

Standard special bricks are made for specific uses in unique form of brickwork. They are made of fine clays to control and decrease the shrinkage deformation during firing. 

Bullnose Bricks

This type of brick has one, some or all of its corners rounded off. Those curves is used to create a soft and attractive curve for a structure such as round steps of staircase.

Radial Bricks

Radial bricks are special bricks used to create curved walls. Radial bricks were created in Europe in the 19th century and were used to build chimneys. Nowadays, radial bricks can be used to create a feature such as giant round pillars or round entrance.

Types of bricks

In the construction industry, there are many types of bricks. But, today we will mainly focus on 3 bricks which are CLAY BRICKS, CALCIUM SILICATE BRICKS and CONCRETE BRICKS. Each of them have different physical properties. The different physical properties of bricks will influence the choice of bricks used for low or high rise building.

Clay bricks

Properties: Have high compressive strength, and fired to sufficiently high temperature can withstand compressive strength.Porosity helps to regulate the temperature of the inside building by release and reabsorb moisture by capillary effect.

The durability of clay bricks is depend on the amount of soluble salts, present in the bricks and the firing temperature.

 Calcium silicate bricks

Properties: Strength of calcium silicate bricks is comparable to to clay bricks. However, they can't achieve the extremely high strength of engineering clay bricks.

The water absorption of calcium silicate bricks is generally higher than clay bricks.

Calcium silicate bricks have satisfactory durability and they cant contact with sewage and exposed to strong acids.

                                                      

Concrete bricks

Properties: Concrete bricks are harder, more difficult to cut than clay or calcium silicate bricks

How to prevent cracks in brickwork ???
Bricks are  the most material used on construction and housing industry. But, sometimes the bricks will crack with the mortar due to the weather influence or the material problem. So, how to prevent it occur?

Brick expansion joint
Brick is a construction material, it will change the volume with the change of the temperature. It will expand due to the moisture and the absorption of water. Using expansion joint in your brickwork, will separate your bricks into small segments, and will behave separate from other segments. The expansion joints will reduce brick cracking by changes in temperature, moisture, and so on.

Bricks vertical joint
Every joint in brickwork is different. There are different condition from one scene to another. So, dun treat all joints in the same ways. Good rule of thumb for the vertical joint in the brickworks are placed 25 every 25 feet. Vertical joints should be located at corners, offsets, setbacks, opening, wall intersection, and long walls.

Bricks horizontal joint
During construction process, remove the temporary shims to hold the angle in position while horizontal joint be located at underneath the shelf-angle.

How to repair the brick crack repair???
Brick crack is very serious things, it will affected the stability of the building even the building will collapse. With a few simple steps you can repair the crack, avoiding the expense of replacing the entire wall

1. Safety first
   Wear a pair of googles to protect your eyes.and the mask to protect ur face to avoid inhaling bits of brick or mortar, then remove the pieces of broken brick with a sledgehammer and chisel.  Slightly expand the crack in the brick with the chisel. Clean all the debris with a wire brush. Ready to fill the part of the crack,
2. Mix the mortar 
   Following the instruction of the package to mix the mortar, spread a little mortar on a scrap of corrugated cardboard and allow it to dry to test the colour. you can take some colouring mix with the mortar to match the previous mortar's colour.
3. Get the prefect shade
   When you have achieved the desired mortar shade, wet the crack down throughly with a garden hose. This should remove any lingering debris and moisten the repair site 
4. Fill the crack
   Fill the crack with mortar by a small trowel. Pack the mortar in firmly, tapping it down into the depth of the break and ensure the surface as even as possible.
5. Finish it
   Once the gap is solidly filled with mortar,  Mortar jointer will finish the surface of the mortar. The jointer should be used to make the joints, the area between the bricks.
6. Left to cure
   When finished the surface, allow the repaired area to cure.
7. Moisten each day
   During the curing process, you will need use water to lightly moisten at patched area in several times of day.
8. Finishing touch
   Optionally, you may finish the mortar-filled cracks by painting the repaired area to match the surrounding wall.