Assessing a Nondestructive Method to Determine the Young's Modulus of Rammed Earth Material

Rammed-earth (RE) material has been the focus of scientific research in the last decade because of the significant heritage of RE buildings throughout the world. Moreover, a renaissance of RE constructions has recently been observed due to this material's sustainable properties. Nondestructive methods are now needed to assess the mechanical behavior of this material, for both old and new RE constructions. This paper presents how in-situ vibrational measurements can be used to identify the dynamic behavior of RE walls and to determine the Young's modulus of the RE walls measured. To determine Young's modulus from the dynamic characteristics, an analytical model based on Timoshenko's beam theory was developed, both for flexural and torsional modes. The proposed analytical model was then verified with measurements on a wall. The comparison showed that the result from the proposed method provided high accuracy and was better than that obtained on the usual specimens (prismatic and cylindrical).