Flexural strength improvement in bamboo reinforced concrete beams subjected to pure bending

Owing to the low tensile strength of concrete, its use is limited. This being the core reason of its reinforcement and the most suitable material that serves the purpose is steel. In current energy crisis scenario, the demanding concern is to find other economical and easily available substitute reinforcement for concrete. Since the production of steel rebar requires huge amount of energy, so the main focus of this research work lies in investigating utilization of bamboo in concrete beams as potential reinforcement. It was found through this exploration that the strips of locally available bamboo have a potential to replace steel rebar in concrete. During the course of this experiment, different types of tests on bamboo material were conducted to find out its various properties which were later used in bamboo reinforced beams design. These properties included water absorption, tensile strength and bond strength. After finding out these parameters, the design of bamboo reinforced concrete beams was done with the same reinforcement ratio but bamboo reinforced strips having different types of patterns on their surface. Another type of beam for same loading conditions was also designed with conventional steel rebar as the main reinforcement. All these beam types after casting were tested to analyze their first crack loads, ultimate loads, failure patterns as well as working out whether this locally available bamboo material was displaying comparable resistance to the loads in similar manner as the beams with steel rebar as main reinforcement. The load deflection graphs and comparison charts were plotted and different properties were equated and discussed in-terms of loading failure types. The extent of strength improvement in bamboo reinforced beams, bond stress comparisons and ultimately their suitability or unsuitability as a rebar element in concrete beams has been dissected.