Abstract: As the earliest concrete in the world, the modified ginger nut has been proved to be proper restoration material for restoring Chinese ancient buildings and cultural relics. In order to study mechanical properties of modified ginger nut, we carry out conventional triaxial compression tests on modified ginger nut. During triaxial test, the failure surfaces are shear failure under low confining pressure (2 MPa). When the confining pressure increases to 6 MPa, there are no obvious failure surfaces but only volume expansion. Mohr circle envelopes are drawn to calculate shear strength parameters. The triaxial test results indicate that the peak strength, peak strain and elastic modulus linearly increased with the increase of confining pressure. The test results indicate that the modified ginger nut has strong deformation capacity as well as mechanical strength. Based on XRD diffraction results and SEM images, we find that quartz particles are covered by hydration and carbonation product and this special structure may be the likely reason to explain why the mechanical strength and deformation capacity are high. The presented results are also expected to provide useful references to the restoration of cultural relics engineering.

Key words: modified ginger nut, mechanical characteristics, stress-strain curve