The importance of sustainable materials in the building industry has grown during the last decades due to the negative impact that industrialised materials have caused over the environment as a consequence of the rapid increase of urban areas, especially in developing countries. To alleviate this problem, research has focused on the utilisation of bamboo, a ready-to-use natural material with a high potential of playing an important role in the future development of the building industry, however, the limitations of the material have not been properly addressed and therefore, the current use of bamboo in the building industry is negligible. This paper presents a digital approach to analyse the structural effects that the inherent geometric variability causes in bamboo poles subjected to bending effects. In contrast with current methodologies that apply the use of conventional tools to determine average geometric properties of a bamboo pole, this work adopted a combination of material testing and 3D scanning of a series of bamboo elements, in order to define suitable parameters for structural analysis that accurately represents the geometric variability of the poles. The results confirmed that the geometric variability produces significant effects that had not been considered before in the mechanical characterisation of bamboo, and that could not have been possible to identify without the use of digital technology. This work encourages the future development of methodologies that implement the use of digital technology to increase the structural understanding of bamboo and therefore, offer a robust platform for the general implementation of bamboo culms in the building industry.
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