Abstract Nigeria’s building construction industry, which heavily relies on traditional sandcrete blocks for wall construction, struggles to balance affordability, timely delivery, and quality to meet client expectation.A comparative study was conducted to evaluate the compressive strength of mortarless interlocking block (MIB) and traditional block. Two block types of MIB named Block A of 450mm x 185mm x 115mm and Block type B of 450mm x 155mm x 225mm were cast. A total number of 27 blocks were cast for each block type A and B of MIB and 9 for conventional blocks of 450mm x 225mm x 225mm with1:6 mixes and 0.5 w/c.Laboratory test was performed on each sample of 3 at 3, 7, and 28days crushing strength. The values of 0.9107Mpa, 0.7078Mpa, 1.1168Mpa, 0.8642Mpa, and 1.5416Mpa were recorded for conventional block, MIB type A, connection A-A, MIB type B, and connection B-B respectively for the compressive strength at 3 days. At 7 days, 2.309Mpa, 1.9071Mpa, 3.062Map, 2.1522Mpa, and 4.3265Mpa were recorded for each sample. The 28 days compressive strength were 4.8382Map, 3.8269Mpa, 5.3998Mpa, 4.5578Mpa, and 7.1393Mpa for conventional block, single half MIB, connection A-A, single full MIB, and connection B-B respectively.Abaqus was used to simulate the blocks and compare the results with 28 days experimental results. The percentage differences of Abaqus FEM are 8.33%, 3.04%, 8.14%, 0.55%, and 4.67% to the experimental results.
Labiran et al. (Tue,) studied this question.