Bamboo as a Sustainable Engineering Material: Mechanical Properties, Safety Factors, and Experimental Testing

• Main Author: Sánchez Vivas, Lorena
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: unknown
• Published: Digital Commons @ University of South Florida 2019
• Subjects: Strength Properties; Infrastructure; Wood; Sustainable Development Goals; WASH; Civil Engineering; Engineering; Environmental Engineering; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/7925; https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/context/etd/article/9122/viewcontent/Sanchez_usf_0206D_15574.pdf

With exponential global population growth occurring and associated environmentally destructive consumption of natural resources, alternative materials that are fast growing and sustainable are being sought out to satisfy human needs. One material that is fast growing and sustainable that can be used to meet most basic needs of humans (i.e. shelter, food, tools) is the plant bamboo, of the grass family Poaceae. Bamboo was used in the past by native peoples who lived in the environment where bamboo natively grows (all continents except Europe and Antarctica) with proven success for uses such as shelter, piping, tools, wells, food, fencing, baskets and much more. These practices were mostly abandoned and deemed obsolete due to the introduction of long lasting ‘modern’ building materials of steel and concrete which gained popularity in the 1800s. Now, in the current century with much advancement in science, technology, and education, humanity is reconsidering many practices and returning to more ancient practices and ways that are better for human health, the environment, and overall sustainability. These environmental considerations are drivers of this research, which focuses on how to use bamboo for engineering applications. First, in order to use a material for engineering and design applications, a material must be destructively tested to attain material property values. Therefore, a critical examination of the bamboo mechanical property values published literature was performed. It was found that although many scientists all over the world have been working on mechanical property testing of bamboo, their results have been published in different journals, in different languages, and had not yet been aggregated and compared. This led to the first study in this work that analyzed mechanical property data from 43 bamboo peer-reviewed publications written in English, Spanish, and Portuguese (the three main languages in which bamboo literature is published). This study focused on aggregating mechanical property ...