Impact Toughness and Quasi-Static Bending Strength of Glubam

Abstract

Glued laminated bamboo (glubam) is an engineered bamboo for the potential usage in structures as an alternative to timber-based glulam. This paper focuses on the impact toughness and static bending strength of glubam, with the goal to provide basic understanding and experimental data for impact design of engineered bamboo structures. Two types of glubam, i.e., thin-strip and thick-strip glubams were investigated through impact pendulum and quasi-static bending tests. For the thick-strip glubam, testing parameters also included three types of manufacturing conditions with different degrees of carbonization of composing bamboo strips. Both comparisons among different types of glubam, and between dynamic and static bending results can effectively identify the impact resistance and mechanical properties of glubam. The dynamic impact loading resulted in higher instability and had failure modes different from quasi-static tests for glubam specimens. Experimental values of toughness, modulus of elasticity (MOE) and modulus of rupture (MOR) at different loading speed conditions are obtained.