A numerical anatomy-based modelling of bamboo microstructure

Abstract

Bamboo has attracted considerable recent interest in sustainable buildings as the fastest-growing natural material retaining mechanical properties similar to structural wood while being an effective CO2 absorber during its growth. Previous efforts to estimate bamboo material properties and their behaviour using homogenisation techniques used simplified assumptions on the geometry of the inhomogeneous microstructure, hence these methods failed to account for the different homogenised material properties in the directions lateral to the bamboo culm. This study presents a novel anatomy-based numerical bamboo microstructure analysis that accurately represents the geometrical features of the material, leading to a transversely anisotropic effective material model. We compare the resulting effective elastic properties to those obtained with state-of-the-art numerical and analytical approaches found in the literature. It is concluded that our anatomy-based representative volume element provides a better understanding of the material microstructure and its corresponding effective stiffness properties in the longitudinal and lateral directions.