Bamboo Fibre is Stronger and Cheaper than Steel– says Dirk Hebel
Bamboo could ‘revoulutinalise the building industry’ and replace steel as the dominant reinforcing material, according to a professor working on new applications for the grass.
Dirk Hebel is a professor at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH). He said bamboo fibre is more sustainable and is a much cheaper alternative to steel on construction sites. It has the potential to prove an alternative to monopoly of reinforced concrete.
This material called bamboo composite material can be pressed into any shape and then sawn or sanded like wood. Whilst forming it into rod shape, it can functions just as a reinforcing matrix for concrete with no loss of performance. According to him, “we can produce a material that in terms of tensile capacity is better than steel,” and “our material is only a quarter of the weight of steel.” Apparently, bamboo fibre performs better than steel in terms of strength to weight. It could also be used in industrial applications such as in the automotive industry.
70% of all steel and 90% of all cement is consumed in developing countries and of these, Hebel found bamboo growing in those areas. Bamboo has high tensile strenght and has actually been long used as a construction material in the developing world as its natural state.Bamboo does not require replanting after harvesting unlike timber Hebel is suggesting to use it as a way of extracting fibres from the plant and mixing it with 10% organic resin to create mouldable material. One breakthrough happened during the testing of the concrete reinforced with bamboo at a lab in Singapore- the machine was not able to break it!
Architecture firms like Kengo Kuma and Shigeru Ban have already started experimenting with this material and Vienna-based Penda has developed proposals for bamboo hotels and even entire modular cities made from this material. Since cement products accounts for 50% of all construction materials used globally, alternating to this material can make a huge difference. Even Berkeley University is working on the development of an alternative to concrete that is not based on cement but on a biological based material made of mycelium-material fungi is made of.
“Can you build high-rises with that material?” he said. “In theory you can but that is not the market we’re talking. Eighty per cent of all structures worldwide are one or two stories. That is our market.”
So many pictures of material tests.
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