Bamboo is the Best Alternative to Steel Reinforcement

Now in Civil engineering, many people are using bamboo in place of steel for reinforcement, but bamboo is an excellent choice for reinforcement in concrete because of its higher strength as compared to steel by weight. The tensile strength Bamboo’s tensile strength is roughly 28,000 per square inch versus steel’s 23,000. Bamboo is stronger more than 6 times of steel reinforcement, on comparison, the energy needed to produce steel is almost 50 times that of this natural product.

Developing countries have the highest demand for steel-reinforced concrete, but often do not have the means to produce the steel to meet that demand.

Rather than put themselves at the mercy of a global MARKET dominated by developed countries, Singapore’s Future Cities Laboratory suggests an alternative to this manufactured rarity: bamboo.

Abundant, sustainable, and extremely resilient, bamboo has potential in the future to become an ideal replacement in places where steel cannot easily be produced.

In trials of tensile strength, bamboo outperforms most other materials, reinforcement steel included. It achieves this strength through its hollow, tubular structure, evolved over millennia to resist wind forces in its natural habitat. This lightweight structure also makes it easy to harvest and transport. Due to its incredibly rapid growth cycle and the variety of areas in which it is able to grow, bamboo is also extremely cheap. These factors alone are incentive for INVESTMENT in developing bamboo as reinforcement.

Indeed, despite these benefits, there is still work to do in overcoming bamboo’s limitations. Contraction and expansion is one such limitation, caused by both temperature changes and water absorption.