Behavior of Sustainable Prefabricated Bamboo Reinforced Wall Panels under Concentrated Load

摘要

Futuristic construction practices would depend mostly on sustainable infrastructure. Unconventional materials such as bamboo, jute fibers, rice husk, fly ash, and recycled aggregates are some of the recent alternate materials that are recently researched upon to develop sustainable infrastructure. Authors have examined the potential of bamboo and fly ash to develop sustainable prefabricated wall panels for the construction industry. In the present study, the behavior of a prefabricated bamboo reinforced wall panels under the concentrated load is presented. Six wall panels of size 2440 x 305 x 50 mm were constructed based on two types of design mixes of cement mortar. First design mix constituted mainly of OPC cement and sand of 1:2 ratio. In the second design mix 63.71% of cement by weight was replaced by fly ash using a design of experiments (DOE) based optimization study. Bamboo (Bambusa Balcoa) strips were used for preparing the reinforcement mat and then the mat was treated with lime and epoxy. Both groups of bamboo reinforced wall panels were tested under the concentrated load as per ASTM E72 guidelines. A maximum load of 5 kN was applied to test the indentation in the panels. It was observed that the wall panels based on optimized design mix had better strength than that without fly ash. The tested panels were observed to fail under the concentrated load which makes them unsuitable for application in construction industry. However, further research is required on cement mortar to improve the performance of these wall panels.