Development of the Structural Uses of Date Palm Rachis for Cheap Wide Span Construction for Rural Communities in the Middle East

Abstract

Date palm rachis is one of the most abundant agricultural wastes in Egypt that is being used traditionally in making furniture and sheathing by rural communities in Egypt. This familiarity attracted previous researchers to develop the use of date palm rachis for cheap construction in order to introduce palm rachis as a local building material which contributes to empowering rural communities in Egypt. Most of the wide-span date palm rachis based previous studies lacked simplicity and flexibility that is required to encourage communities to exploit the structural abilities of palm rachis. This paper aims to exploit the philosophy and potentials of palm rachis by combining traditional concepts with modern techniques in order to increase the available covered spans, which would promote the potentials of Date Palm Rachis. This aim is served by introducing a new concept of using palm rachis for simple wide span construction utilizing arched truss Form-Active structural systems. This primary design is built in an experimental scaled model to investigate the durability and details of the suggested system. The findings encourage researchers and local builders to investigate the potentials of date palm rachis as a cheap and local building material for rural communities in Egypt.