Construction Materials, Materials Type.

Materials of Construction :

Concrete :

Concrete is a construction material that consists, in its most common form, of Portland cement, construction aggregate and water.Concrete does not solidify from drying after mixing and placement; the water reacts with the cement in a chemical process known as hydration. This water is absorbed by the cement, which hardens, bonding the other components together and eventually creating a stone-like material.Concrete is used more than any other man made material on the planet. It is used to make pavements, building structures, foundations, motorways/roads, overpasses, parking structures, brick/block walls and footings for gates, fences and poles.

Wood :

Wood is derived from woody plants, notably trees but also shrubs. Wood from the latter is only produced in small sizes, reducing the diversity of uses.In its most common meaning, "wood" is the secondary xylem of a woody plant, but this is an approximation only: in the wider sense, wood may refer to other materials and tissues with comparable properties. Wood is a heterogeneous, hygroscopic, cellular and anisotropic material.
Wood has been used for millennia for many purposes, being many things to many people. One of its primary uses is as fuel. It is also used as a material, for making artworks, boats, buildings, furniture, ships, tools, weapons, and more. Wood has been an important construction material since humans began building shelters, and remains in common use today. Construction wood is commonly known as lumber in North America and timber elsewhere. Wood may be broken down and reconstituted into chipboard, engineered wood, hardboard, medium-density fibreboard (MDF), oriented strand board (OSB), paper or used to make other synthetic substances.

Rock(Stone) :

The mining of rocks for their metal ore content has been one of the most important factors of human advancement. Humanity's advancement has been decided by the kind of metals available from the rocks of a region. The prehistory of civilization is classified into the stone age, iron age, and bronze age. Rocks have been and continue to be used to construct buildings and infrastructure.A rock is a naturally occurring aggregate of minerals and/or mineraloids. Rocks are classified by mineral and chemical composition, by the texture of the constituent particles and by the processes that formed them. These indicators separate rocks into igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. They may also be classified according to grain size, in the case of conglomerates and breccias or in the case of individual stones.

Steel :

Steel is a metal alloy whose major component is iron, with carbon content between 0.02% and 1.7% by weight. Carbon is the most cost effective alloying material for iron, but many other alloying elements are also used. Carbon and other elements act as a hardening agent, preventing dislocations in the iron atom crystal lattice from sliding past one another. Varying the amount of alloying elements and their distribution in the steel controls qualities such as the hardness, elasticity, ductility, and tensile strength of the resulting steel. Steel with increased carbon content can be made harder and stronger than iron, but is also more brittle. The maximum solubility of carbon in iron is 1.7% by weight, occurring at 1130° Celsius; higher concentrations of carbon or lower temperatures will produce cementite which will reduce the material's strength. Alloys with higher carbon content than this are known as cast iron because of their lower melting point. Steel is also to be distinguished from wrought iron with little or no carbon, usually less than 0.035%. It is common today to talk about 'the iron and steel industry' as if it were a single thing; it is today, but historically they were separate products.

Glass :

Glass is a uniform material of arguable phase, usually produced when the viscous molten material cools very rapidly to below its glass transition temperature, without sufficient time for a regular crystal lattice to form. The most familiar form of glass is the Silica-based material used for household objects such as light bulbs and windows.Glass is a biologically inactive material that can be formed into smooth and impervious surfaces. Glass is brittle and will break into sharp shards. These properties can be modified or changed with the addition of other compounds or heat treatment.

The most obvious characteristic of ordinary glass is that it is transparent to visible light (not all glassy materials are). This transparency is due to an absence of electronic transition states in the range of visible light, and because ordinary glass is homogeneous on all length scales greater than about a wavelength of visible light. Glasses used for making optical devices are categorized using a six-digit glass code, or alternatively a letter-number code from the Schott Glass catalogue. For example, BK7 is a low-dispersion borosilicate crown glass, and SF10 is a high-dispersion dense flint glass. The glasses are arranged by composition, refractive index, and Abbe number.

Glass is sometimes created naturally from volcanic magma. This glass is called obsidian, and is usually black with impurities. Obsidian is a raw material for flintknappers, who have used it to make extremely sharp knives since the stone age. Collecting obsidian from national parks and other locations may be prohibited by law in some countries, but the same toolmaking techniques can be applied to industrially-made glass.

Drywall :

Drywall, also commonly known as gypsum board, plasterboard , or rock lath, and sheetrock is a common manufactured building material used globally for the finish construction of interior walls and ceilings.A drywall panel is made of a paper liner wrapped around an inner core made primarily from gypsum plaster, the semi-hydrous form of calcium sulphate (CaSO4.½ H2O). The plaster is mixed with fiber, foaming agent, various additives that increase mildew and fire resistance, and water and is then formed by sandwiching a core of wet gypsum between two sheets of heavy paper or fiberglass mats. When the core sets and is dried, the sandwich becomes rigid and strong.

Straw-bale construction :

Straw-bale construction is a building method that uses straw bales as structural elements, insulation, or both. It is commonly used in natural building. It has advantages over some conventional building system because of its cost and easy availability, and its high insulation value.

Straw bales offer excellent insulation. At R 2.7 per inch, an eighteen-inch wide bale equals R-48. One California study indicated that such a "super-insulated" straw bale home could save as much as 75% of heating and cooling costs! This translates to direct dollar savings for the homeowner, and a corresponding reduction in the use of fossil fuels and CO2 emissions.Construction costs can also be reduced when building with straw bales. They are cheap to buy and easy to build with. Stacked like huge bricks, straw bale wall systems can be erected quickly without much building experience and few power tools. In a "barn-raising" type party, it's common for all the straw bale walls in a modest size structure to be erected in a single day.Building with bales can also cut down on cutting down trees by reducing lumber used in typical "stick frame" construction. Straw is available wherever grain crops are grown, and is annually renewable. In fact, it's considered an agricultural waste product, and in many parts of the world is simply burned in the fields. The millions of tons which go up in smoke every year cause a great deal of air pollution. It makes sense to bale this nuisance, and turn it into an energy-efficient resource.Those concerned with indoor air quality also appreciate straw bale buildings for their "breathability." A non-toxic product itself, bales allow a gradual transfer of air through the wall, bringing fresh air into your living environment, especially when combined with a natural plaster. And you can forget about neighborhood noise, too. Straw bales are so sound proof, one Nebraska pioneer family was found playing cards in their kitchen, oblivious to the roar of a tornado which had just blown through the town.

Adobe :

Adobe is a natural building material composed of sand, sandy clay and straw or other organic materials, which is shaped into bricks using wooden frames and dried in the sun. It is similar to cob and mudbrick. Adobe structures are extremely durable and account for the oldest extant buildings on the planet. Adobe buildings also offer significant advantages in hot, dry climates; they remain cooler as adobe stores and releases heat very slowly.

Buildings made of sun-dried earth are common in the Middle East, North Africa, and in Spain, but adobe had been in use by indigenous peoples of the Americas in the Southwestern United States, Mesoamerica, and the Andean region of South America for several thousand years, although often substantial amounts of stone are used in the walls of Pueblo buildings. This method of brickmaking was imported to Spain in the 16th century by Spaniards who had traveled to Mexico and Peru.

Brick :

Brick is an artificial stone made by forming clay into rectangular blocks which are hardened, either by burning in a kiln or sometimes, in warm countries, by sun-drying.Bricks are used for building and pavement. In the USA, brick pavement was found incapable of withstanding heavy traffic, but it is coming back into use as a method of traffic calming or as a decorative surface in pedestrian precincts.

Bricks are also used in the metallurgy and glass industries for lining furnaces. They have various uses, especially refractory bricks such as silica, magnesia, chamotte and neutral (chromomagnesite) refractory bricks. This type of brick must have good thermal shock resistance, refractoriness under load, high melting point, and satisfactory porosity. There is a large refractory brick industry, especially in the United Kingdom, Japan and the U.S.A..

Rammed earth :

Rammed earth construction, also known as pisé de terre or simply pisé, is an age-old building method that has seen a revival in recent years as people seek low-impact building materials and natural building methods. Traditionally, rammed earth buildings are common in arid regions where wood is in scarce supply.

Walls are constructed from a mixture of earth that has suitable proportions of sand, gravel and clay sometimes with an added stabilizer. Traditional stabilizers such as lime or animal blood were used to stabilise the material, but cement has been the stabilizer of choice for modern times.In modern variations of the method the rammed earth walls are constructed on top of conventional footings or a reinforced concrete base, sometimes with extra ground insulation from a horizontal layer of styrofoam. Some builders also add coloured oxides or other items such as bottles or pieces of timber to add variety to the structure.

Ferrocement :

Ferrocement is both a method and a material used in building or sculpture with cement, sand, water and wire or mesh material - often called the thin shell. Thin shell ferrocement offers strength and economy and has a broad range of applications which include home building, creating sculptures, or building boats and ships.
The desired shape is built from a multi-layered construction of chicken wire, and if needed reinforced with steel wire or steel bars. Over this finished framework, an appropriate mixture of cement, sand and water is spread out. During hardening, the ferrocement is kept moist, to ensure the cement is able to set and harden.

Aggregate :

Aggregate is the component of a composite material used to resist compressive stress. For efficient filling, aggregate should be much smaller than the finished item, but have a wide variety of sizes.
In most cases, the ideal finished piece would be 100% aggregate. A given application's most desirable quality is usually most prominent in the aggregate itself; all the aggregate lacks is the ability to flow on a small scale, and form attachments between particles. The matrix is specifically chosen to serve this role, but its abilities should not be abused.

Slipform stone :

A reinforced concrete wall with stone facing in which stones and mortar are built up in courses within reusable slipforms. It is a cross between traditional mortared stone wall and a veneered stone wall. Short forms, up to 60 cm high, are placed on both sides of the wall to serve as a guide for the stone work. You place stones inside the forms with the good faces against the form work and pour concrete in behind the rocks. Rebar is added for strength, to make a wall that is approximately half concrete and rebar and half stonework. The wall can be faced with stone on one side or both sides. With slipforms it is easy for a novice to build free-standing stone walls.

Asphalt :

Asphalt is a sticky, black and highly viscous liquid or semi-solid that is present in most crude petroleums and in some natural deposits. Asphalt is composed almost entirely of bitumen. There is some disagreement amongst chemists regarding the structure of asphalt, but it is most commonly modeled as a colloid, with asphaltenes as the dispersed phase and maltenes as the continuous phase.There are two forms commonly used in construction: rolled asphalt and mastic asphalt. Rolled asphalt is one of the forms of road surfacing material known collectively as blacktop; another form is the macadam, including both tar and bituminous macadams. The terms asphalt and tarmac tend to be used interchangeably in common usage, although they are distinct products.

Structural insulated panel :

Structural insulated panels, SIPs, are a composite building material. They consist of a sandwich of two layers of structural board with an insulating layer of foam in between. The board is usually Oriented Strand Board and the foam either polystyrene foam or polyurethane foam.SIPs allow the application of an internal and external structural skin and thermal insulation to a building in one stage, offering efficiency benefits. They are commonly used in conjunction with modern timber framed buildings.

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