Nonlinear analysis of a bamboo plywood-steel composite I-section beam under bending

Abstract

Bamboo is a promising “green” building material with mechanical and thermal properties of engineered bamboo products (EBPs) being competitive with engineered wood products. However, their structural connections are still a major concern and must be addressed comprehensively to extend their applications in low to mid-rise buildings. This study presents a nonlinear simulation of a laminated bamboo-steel hybrid composite I-section beam subjected to pure bending. Using a three-dimensional Finite Element (FE) analysis, the load-bearing capacity and deformation was investigated. First, an orthotropic constitutive relation of EBPs using Hill’s failure criterion is established and applied to the hybrid beam subjected to four-point bending. The model is built in ANSYS workbench and is validated with experimental results on the elastic material parameters of Moso bamboo. It is demonstrated that the computational model provides a prediction very close to the experiments with an average difference as low as 3%. The load–displacement curve obtained from the hybrid composite beam under flexure is also close to the experimental data. This good agreement is attributed to the incorporation of material, geometrical, and contact nonlinearities in the model.