Cleaner construction of social housing infrastructure with load-bearing alkali-activated masonry

Population explosion, changing lifestyles, and a lack of housing facilities have created an acute shortage of affordable housing all over the globe. This essential part of the infrastructure of a country has put pressure on several governments to come up with new decisions to boost the rate of construction. UN Habitat (2016) emphasized this need, as only 13% of the cities in the world have sufficient affordable housing. Encouraging local authorities to work on some advanced techniques and alternative building typology with locally available resources could resolve this problem and simultaneously avoid depletion of natural resources. The present study deals with the development of alkali-activated bricks using co-fired blended ash, an industrial waste. As a preliminary study, the benefits of tailoring construction materials for large-scale housing construction using locally available wastes have been demonstrated. Physico-mechanical, thermal, and durability properties of the developed bricks were evaluated. As compared to a fly ash brick, the developed alkali-activated brick is 11% light in weight, which has 56% higher compressive strength and 62% lower thermal conductivity. Techno-economic aspect was evaluated with respect to long-lasting product optimization and modularization. The viability of the brick was evaluated and optimized using a slum housing project in Nagpur, India, by the computational method. The study resulted 7% cost reduction, 21% reduction in embodied energy, and 17% reduction in operational energy over the existing practice of construction. These statistics emphasize the strategy for energy conservation and low-cost housing construction.