Design and construction of a solar powered compressed earth brick making machine

Abstract

Brick/block is a very important material in the construction industry, a brick is required for every construction activity bit shelter & housing, hydraulic structures (for example in the masonry dam construction) and in so many other fields. The production of good quality, most efficient, and affordable bricks is paramount to solve housing problems in developing countries like Uganda (Premkumar et al., 2020). This is still seemingly hard to obtain due to the high cost of brick production in developing countries. Fortunately, many naturally occurring substances, such as clay, sand, wood, and rocks are over 90% available in these rural areas and can be employed to cut down costs on materials. However, the cost of sophisticated modern brick Moulding machines ranges between $2,500 and $3,000 (Mogaji, 2011) and there daily operation cost is generally high due to the use of electricity (costly units 1500ugx) or fuels to run the machine motors. While there are cheaper manually operated machine options on the market, these are very laborious and hectic to use. Thus, the solar powered Compressed Earth Brick (CEB) making machine employs solar energy to hydraulically compress the soil mixture. This machine overcomes the laborious effort and low productivity of manually compressed earth bricks. This also technology mitigates the challenge of environment pollution caused by fired brick kilns. The constructed compressive earth brick (CEB) making machine can produce on average a total of 240 bricks per day (8 hours). The cost of production of the machine was 2.08 million UGX only. Whereas, the most common hightech motorized CEB machine(Hydra form®) with an average capacity of about 3,000 bricks per day costs about six million shillings(Yakubu & Umar, 2015).Thus this machine is relatively cheaper for small scale enterprises.