Performance and Durability Evaluation of Bamboo Reinforced Cement Concrete Beams

Abstract

A big part of population in India is still homeless due to raising unaffordability of housing structures. People sleeping on roadsides and living in slums is a common sight in Indian cities. To overcome this problem India today needs millions of houses for their growing population, making concrete as the most widely to be used material in the country. Concrete has found to have excellent compressive strength but poor in tensile strength, to take care of the tensile stresses steel is commonly used as reinforcing material in concrete. Production of steel is a very costly business and its use in concrete as reinforcing material increases the cost of construction by many folds. Also production of steel emits a large amount of green house gases causing considerable deterioration of the environment. The above mentioned socio-economic and environmental factors creates a necessity for finding an appropriate environment friendly and cheap material that can successfully substitute steel as reinforcement in concrete elements of a low cost dwelling for the poor and homeless people of the country. It is here that engineered bamboo can be of great value to Civil Engineers owning to its several net worthy features. Production of every tone of bamboo consumes about a tone of atmospheric CO2 in addition to releasing fresh O2. From structural point of view bamboo has been used as a structural material from the earlier times as it possesses excellent flexure and tensile strength as well as high strength to weight ratio. All this necessitates examining bamboo-reinforced cement concrete in detail for its appropriateness as a structural material for construction of a low cost dwelling unit. The study focuses on evaluating the mechanical and durability properties of cement-concrete beams both singly and doubly reinforced with bamboo splints.