Conservation of Traditional Mud and Brick Construction in Desert Cities by Using Moisture and Sound Absorbing Pavements

Conservation of architectural monuments and buildings has become very important to the world today because these monuments are cultural wealth and represent the antiquity, identity, history and civilization of each land and on the other hand the prosperity of the tourism industry in each country. One of these architectural buildings, which is also known as Earth Architecture, is clay and mud structures that are very common in Iran, especially in desert cities with hot and dry climates. Numerous factors cause the destruction of these clay and mud structures, one of the main causes of the destruction of this type of structures is moisture that mainly the accumulation of rainwater runoff at the foot of the clay and mud walls is the main source of it. One solution to conserve this structure from rain runoff is to use moisture-absorbing procedures that, in addition to being permeable, have also the ability to absorb sound and reduce noise pollution and evaporate to cool the air. This study was performed to evaluate the performance of porous asphalt in traditional texture passages in order to prevent runoff and moisture from infiltrating to mud-brick buildings and thus its protection, as well as to investigate the property of reducing noise pollution to provide peace of mind of traditional textures, create an evaporation process to provide thermal comfort to traditional textures and the degree of resistance of porous asphalt and its comparison with current (impermeable) asphalt by making laboratory samples. Furthermore, because in the traditional-tourism texture passages, visual beauty is also of special importance, by running a piece of porous asphalt in one of the local passages, the speed of changing the color of porous asphalt from black to gray over time with the help of image processing with coding MATLAB was reviewed and compared with conventional asphalt. According to the results, the permeability and evaporation of porous asphalt are 0.00178 m/s and 13.6 gr/day, respectively, whereas these values are zero for conventional asphalt. The results also show that the amount of noise pollution produced by porous asphalt traffic and its Marshall resistance are 8% and 23% less than that of conventional asphalt pavement, respectively, and that the speed of color change in porous asphalt to reduce color opacity is much faster than that of conventional asphalt pavement.