Experimental Analysis on the Feasibility of Bamboo Reinforcement in Concrete Mix Design and Comparison with Steel Reinforced Concrete

Besides being chief construction ingredients, concrete and steel produce a high amount of CO2, and high energy consumption promotes global warming. To evade this problem, green and low energy consuming alternative is required. Rapid growing time with the least period to attend optimum strength made bamboo a new immerging mainstream constituent in construction. Bamboo, as one of the probable alternate structural materials, not only promises a sustainable and sturdy option but also reduces the environmental carbon footprint. In this research, article authors replaced steel reinforcement in concrete with bamboo. To establish bamboo as a construction material, a concrete beam of 200 mm × 500 mm is made in which bamboo bars of diameter 20 mm are used with a variation of 1 to 4% of the reinforcement area. Various tests were performed to provide the feasibility of bamboo as construction materials after 28 days of curing, in which test results were found promising. The impact test shows only 25% of wear and tear. Also, bamboo reinforced concrete (BRC) without changing cross sections provided 50% axial compressive strength compared to steel reinforced concrete (SRC). However, in the tensile test, BRC outperformed SRC by providing 50% more resistance against tensile load. Authors also performed rate analysis between SRC and BRC to find that it almost reduces 18% of the cost at a small scale. Hence here, comparative research is provided, and the authors believe that it would pave the road on which forthcoming researchers will walk to reach the destination of finding an alternate, sustainable, and green construction material in the form of bamboo. © 2023 R. Sivakumar et al.