Experimental investigation and design method on a lightweight bamboo-concrete sandwich panel under bending load

Abstract

Bamboo could reinforce the aerated concrete externally, producing a very high stiff and lightweight sandwich panel. The structural behavior of the bamboo-concrete sandwich panel has been proposed. The resulting bamboo sandwich panel can be used as a structural or non-structural element for low costs and low-rise housing construction. Ten bamboo-concrete sandwich panels, four steel-concrete sandwich panels and four ALC panels were designed, fabricated and investigated through a three-point bending test to study their strength and ductility responses. The experimental results showed that the failure modes were attributed to bamboo tensile yielding at the middle of the bottom face, followed by ALC shear cracks at the maximum shear point. The results show using bamboo in sandwich panels highly increases the structural properties such as moment capacity, ductility and bending stiffness. Besides, the experimental results proved that in the bamboo-concrete sandwich panel under bending test, increasing face thickness from 9 mm to 13.5 mm increases ductility, moment capacity and bending stiffness by 3.5 %, 42.1 % and 127 %, respectively. However, face thickness is the more effective parameter. In addition, the experimental load of the bamboo-concrete sandwich panel was higher than the steel-concrete sandwich panel with the same weight.