Structural grade development for round bamboo: A Review: Fid-Bau Portal

Structural grade development for round bamboo: A Review

Shikur, Beharu D. / Zerayohannes, Girma / Gebre, Abrham

It is vital to construct strong and environmentally friendly buildings using renewable and locally sourced materials, along with sustainable production and usage practices. Recently, there has been a surge in research on bamboo and bamboo-related products as an eco-friendly and alternative construction material. However, the lack of comprehensive practical and scientific knowledge of its structural characteristics and performance has hindered the widespread usage of bamboo as a construction element. For alternative building materials to be approved for use in construction, their structural behavior must be reliable and predictable. Therefore, it has been suggested that bamboo’s fundamental properties need to be studied before it can be accepted as a building material. This paper reviews and summarizes the research status of bamboo grading and its procedure for grade development as a building material from the perspective of conditional properties, dimensional properties, and the geometric uncertainty of bamboo culms. Its strength or capacity grading can be achieved using ISO 22156 method, confident band method, and machine Learning techniques, enabling structural grading. Some scholars suggest moving from the ISO technique and adopting the confidence interval approach to formulate a grading mechanism for bamboo culms. However, to conduct a more rigorous statistical analysis and acquire reliable characteristic values of selected mechanical properties, others recommend machine learning (ML) methods. Recent studies have proposed using regression equations and classification methods as part of a standard to establish a sufficient benchmark for bamboo grading, which can be customized for different species and source regions.