Performance of Clay Brick of Bengkulu

This article identified the production method and the performance of clay brick in Bengkulu Municipality. This study is urgent since the available information is very limited. Most brick production in Bengkulu is handmade. Most of the factories use the ground as the clay materials. The bricks specimens were taken from 20 factories of 2 sub-districts with the most number of brick factories existed. In order to find out the method and the shrinkage of the brick, 2 brick factories in each sub-district were studied. The physical and mechanical properties were done in accordance to Standard Nasional Indonesia (SNI) and ASTM. The result shows that there is big gap of the compressive strength of different sub-districts but the strength met the quality of the code. While the other properties are rather close in value. The absorption is about 25%. The shrinkage of the brick volume is bigger than 42.27% which is smaller than the shrinkage of the weight. This might happen because the clay brick in Bengkulu contain only clay. Most factories use clay that is taken from the ground where the factories existed.