Scrap tires could gain a new purpose as ingredients for construction materials, thanks to research at Missouri University of Science and Technology.
Discarded tires are a big problem. Landfills are teeming with them and they can harbor disease-carrying mosquitos and rodents. Stockpiles of old tires also burn easily — creating fires that can quickly get out of control and may burn for months or even years.
But the longevity and resilience of scrap tires also makes them ideal for other uses.
Dr. Mohamed A. El Gawady, a researcher at Missouri S&T, is currently testing new masonry blocks made with ground tires.
“Rubber has a lot of benefits in addition to its sustainability,” says El Gawady, associate professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering. “It’s very durable and provides good insulation. Among their many potential benefits, these new blocks could cut heating bills by 50 percent.”
ElGawady has been working with Midwest Block and Brick, a Jefferson City, Mo.-based company, to create the blocks, which are made from sand and scrap tires ground to fine particles.
These rubber-added blocks, called rubberized blocks, were constructed with a variety of ratios of sand to rubber particles before coming up with the right balance.
“The rubber makes the blocks a bit weaker, so after testing various percentages, we now only replace about 20 percent of the sand with rubber, so the blocks retain their strength,” ElGawady says.
He and his students use a compression machine to test and compare the strength of prisms built with the rubberized blocks to conventional concrete masonry blocks.
Both rubberized and conventional blocks are being tested in an environmental chamber at Missouri S&T. In the chamber, the blocks undergo cycles of extreme temperatures and humidity levels, simulating different weather conditions. The rubberized blocks are also tested under cyclic compression loads simulating earthquake loads.
“Construction with these new blocks could improve a building’s resiliency during an earthquake by acting as shock absorbers,” says ElGawady.
Related Stories
| Oct 13, 2010
County building aims for the sun, shade
The 187,032-sf East County Hall of Justice in Dublin, Calif., will be oriented to take advantage of daylighting, with exterior sunshades preventing unwanted heat gain and glare. The building is targeting LEED Silver. Strong horizontal massing helps both buildings better match their low-rise and residential neighbors.
| Oct 12, 2010
Holton Career and Resource Center, Durham, N.C.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Special Recognition. Early in the current decade, violence within the community of Northeast Central Durham, N.C., escalated to the point where school safety officers at Holton Junior High School feared for their own safety. The school eventually closed and the property sat vacant for five years.
| Oct 12, 2010
Guardian Building, Detroit, Mich.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Special Recognition. The relocation and consolidation of hundreds of employees from seven departments of Wayne County, Mich., into the historic Guardian Building in downtown Detroit is a refreshing tale of smart government planning and clever financial management that will benefit taxpayers in the economically distressed region for years to come.
| Oct 12, 2010
Richmond CenterStage, Richmond, Va.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Bronze Award. The Richmond CenterStage opened in 1928 in the Virginia capital as a grand movie palace named Loew’s Theatre. It was reinvented in 1983 as a performing arts center known as Carpenter Theatre and hobbled along until 2004, when the crumbling venue was mercifully shuttered.
| Oct 12, 2010
University of Toledo, Memorial Field House
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Memorial Field House, once the lovely Collegiate Gothic (ca. 1933) centerpiece (along with neighboring University Hall) of the University of Toledo campus, took its share of abuse after a new athletic arena made it redundant, in 1976. The ultimate insult occurred when the ROTC used it as a paintball venue.
| Oct 12, 2010
Owen Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Officials at Michigan State University’s East Lansing Campus were concerned that Owen Hall, a mid-20th-century residence facility, was no longer attracting much interest from its target audience, graduate and international students.
| Oct 12, 2010
Gartner Auditorium, Cleveland Museum of Art
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Gartner Auditorium was originally designed by Marcel Breuer and completed, in 1971, as part of his Education Wing at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Despite that lofty provenance, the Gartner was never a perfect music venue.
| Oct 12, 2010
Cell and Genome Sciences Building, Farmington, Conn.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Administrators at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington didn’t think much of the 1970s building they planned to turn into the school’s Cell and Genome Sciences Building. It’s not that the former toxicology research facility was in such terrible shape, but the 117,800-sf structure had almost no windows and its interior was dark and chopped up.
| Oct 12, 2010
The Watch Factory, Waltham, Mass.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards — Gold Award. When the Boston Watch Company opened its factory in 1854 on the banks of the Charles River in Waltham, Mass., the area was far enough away from the dust, dirt, and grime of Boston to safely assemble delicate watch parts.
| Oct 12, 2010
Cuyahoga County Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, Cleveland, Ohio
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Gold Award. The Cuyahoga County Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument was dedicated on the Fourth of July, 1894, to honor the memory of the more than 9,000 Cuyahoga County veterans of the Civil War.