Uncertainties About the Toughness Property of Raw Earth Construction Materials

Silt-based construction material is an ecological and economical alternative for typical cement-based concrete and has received lately the researchers’ attention more than before. Some researches were done on the raw earth material to enhance its characteristics as strength and ductility for being widely used for various materials. Yet, many other mechanical properties can be used to study the mechanical properties of raw earth materials such as strain modulus and toughness. Studies concerning the toughness of a material were rarely considered previously except for metals despite its significant role associated to the energy absorbed by the material under loading before fracturing. The purpose of this paper is to restate the normal toughness definition used in the literature for typical construction materials and presents the possibilities of the repetitions of our experimental tests showing the statistical error occurred between same tests performed comparing the stress-strain graphs for three replicates done for each formulation out of 25. This paper will focus on the uncertainties and the possibility to neglect the intruding samples to reach better results and better simulate and fit the experimental data in numerical analysis. Experimental tests has some statistical errors and the uncertainties must be minimal compared to the complications of the experiment.