materials+review

In the following page I am going to summarize four of the most important construction materials. Among them are: stones, brick, iron, steel and concrete. Stones are solid rocks, which are found and almost always used in their natural state. Some of their advantages are their long durability, its facility for bonding (they don’t require mortar). In the other hand, they are difficult to cut, transport and quarry. Stones have weakness with loads pushing at angles, so a good disposition is mandatory. Another disadvantage is that they are very expensive. Bricks are made of different materials. The most common is clay. They are used for building, pavement and also in the metallurgy and glass industries for lining surfaces. There are several techniques of bricklaying influenced in the bonding style. Among them are: the stretcher bond and the english bond. Iron is not as used as steel as a construction material. It has lots of compression strength, but lacks in tension. Steel, by the other hand, compensates tensile and compression strength. It is relevant to say that steel is more appealing than iron. So it is not surprising the fact that steel replaced iron in the construction world. Concrete is a manufactured mixture of cement and water, with aggregates of sand and stones, which hardens rapidly by chemical combination to a stonelike, water-and-fire-resisting solid of great compressive but low tensile strength. Although, Reinforced concrete was developed to add the tensile strength of steel to the compressive strength of mass concrete and nowadays is more economic than other materials. We could consider concrete the most used material for construction