Interactive buckling of structural local bamboo in Malaysia

Abstract

Bamboo is a naturally available construction material and one of the fastest growing plant compared with the tree, which increases its suitability to be used as a sustainable source for wood industry, especially in construction works. Due to the lack of understanding on bamboo properties and lack of design standard, the utilization of bamboo in construction has always been neglected. This paper presents an investigation on the buckling behaviour of three species treated bamboos that are available in Malaysia, which included Bambusa Vulgaris, Dendrocalamus Asper, and Gigantochloa Scortechinii. Furthermore, a design method based on Perry-Robertson formula was proposed for compressive buckling of the bamboo. The experimental compressive buckling on 15 columns was conducted to investigate the buckling behaviours and the design procedure was developed by using the test data results. It was shown that for Dendrocalamus Asper, the model factors of the proposed design method was 1.16 while Bambusa Vulgaris was 1.15 and Gigantochloa Scortechinii was also 1.15. As result, the proposed design method was shown to be adequate and also was successfully calibrated against the test data. Thus, the advantages of bamboo in the structural application should be fully utilized to build light, strong bamboo structure.