Physical and Mechanical Property Characterization of Hemp Shive Reinforced Gypsum Composite Board

Abstract

Known and used since Antiquity, the hemp plant comes back to the attention of the researchers focused on making new ecological products used to reduce the environmental impact in the construction sector. A sustainable building environment needs to develop relations with renewable raw materials. This study aims to make an investigation in the products based on gypsum and hemp shives, where hemp shives are an agricultural plant and gypsum a natural resource produced by burning gypsum plaster. Using the multicriterial analysis, the best performing formula is identified, in order to satisfy thermal insulation, sound insulation, mechanical and fire related requirements and in which the variable is the hemp shives percentage in the composite material. The three recipes prepared were compared with the normative and other studies. The results presented at the end of this study shows that in terms of acoustic absortion and thermal conductivity, the insulating materials are best when the volume of hemp grows. Meanwhile the positive aspect of growing the volume of hemp for insulation materials becomes a disadvantage from the mechanical point of view, where to have high values of strength is recomanded a low volume of hemp.