Claylock®

Airey Taylor Consulting’s  foundation system “ClayLock®”, patented October 2005, stablises low-rise housing, community, and commercial buildings on reactive clay soils.

Historically, approaches to foundation designs on clay soils have worked to resist or compensate for movement of these reactive soils, particularly differential movement across concrete slabs.  Despite the best efforts of the engineering community, cracking is a serious problem.  38% of 75,000 houses surveyed by Archicentre nationally in 2005 were cracked.

ClayLock® uses natural forces to bring about lasting soil stability for each construction, thus obviating the need for complex footing strategies. The technique involves:

• Artificially extending the footprint of the building to protect it from seasonal edge effects, using an inexpensive polyethylene membrane; and
• Accelerating the soil condition to its final moisture content beneath and around the slab during the first stages of construction

Polyethylene plays a key role as it prevents moisture escape in either liquid or gaseous form. Moisturisation is via a one-off irrigation beneath the newly cast slab and into the encapsulated extended footprint area. By doing this the clay “mound” or “dome” usually encountered after years of moisture equilibration, becomes the stable state under workable timeframes.

ClayLock® is the first significant advance in clay-related foundation design since the 1970’s when Australian researcher Dr John Holland’s world first research pre-empted the present design code AS 2870 “Residential Slabs and Footings – Construction”. We believe it to contribute significantly to the international body of knowledge on foundation design.

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