Earthen Construction Additives Map

“Additives for Earthen Materials” is a broad topic with significant potential for innovation and improved efficiency in earthen construction. Since earthen construction systems have been used for thousands of years, their components and material variations are extremely diverse. Today, technological developments and the emergence of new synthetic materials have further expanded the range of potential additives. This raises several questions: How many additives for earthen construction have been properly studied? How are these studies structured? And is it possible, with the assistance of AI, to develop an automated assessment of the published literature in this field?

To address these and other questions, an experimental study was carried out within the InDeckLe project at the Institute for Timber Construction (IfH) at Hochschule Biberach (HBC). The main objective was to collect as much published data as possible with the assistance of AI, analyse the publications using a large language model (LLM), and organise the extracted relationships between additives and material properties in an interactive visualisation. This makes it easier to explore which additives have been studied and how they influence different properties of earthen materials.

The complete workflow and code have been published on GitHub. We invite researchers and other interested users to explore the code, provide feedback, and contribute to improving future versions of the network.

Professor in charge: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Philipp Wiehle 

Project management: Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Jörg Schänzlin

Project work: Danilo Carcamo Linnebrink

Part of the project "InDeckLe: Innovative Deckenkonstruktionen aus Lehmverbund in industrieller Bauweise"