BAMBOO COMPOSITE BEAMS TO SUBSTITUTE LUMBER FRAMING IN RESIDENTIAL CONSTRUCTION

Abstract

Residential construction plays major role in making people’s dwelling as the basic need. Different cultures perform their construction differently, depending on their available materials and technology. Most typical residential construction use wood or timber as the material because it is easy to work with. However, timber becomes harder to find and get expensive. They also take up to two decades to harvest. Industry is trying to find alternatives to substitute timber uses, such as laminated lumber and all engineered lumbers. These engineered materials do not offer access to everyone. This research explores opportunity for local people to do construction using their available local materials, yet effective. Bamboo is also local and abundant material to most tropical areas. Bamboo is light and strong, yet renewable because it only takes 3 years to produce. The research proposed the composite beams made by bamboo with local lumber. This is to take advantage of the properties of bamboo to increase the structural performance. This research explored five designs of composite beams, using bamboo compositing with lumber and plywood beams. Different bamboo configurations are added to top and bottom of lumber beams. Webs of beam are either dimensional lumber or plywood. Five composite beams were then tested in structural laboratory. It is found that bamboo composite beams significantly made the loading improvement in bending capacity from 1.9 to 3.9 times, comparing to lumber beams alone.