Mechanical Properties of Laminated Bamboo Lumber Made of Tropical Species

Bamboo has been the trend for a sustainable material, due to its renewability. Bamboo can grow abundantly throughout the tropical area of the world, such as Latin America, East Asia and Southeast Asia. It is seen that Southeast Asia has variety of bamboo to utilize and many of them are suitable for structural applications. One additional reason is that they are clumping type, so fibers are built stronger. Bamboo is hollow and irregular in sizes and shapes, so it cannot maximize the use out of the materials. Bamboo Laminated Lumber (LBL) is the product to solve bamboo issues on the irregularity be transforming into solid lumber. It can be called the engineered bamboo, which have been transformed conventional form of bamboo using engineering process. This is the same technology as laminated timber. It has more potential to substitute the use of timber. This research is to experiment of making LBL using structural bamboo species that are widely used in Southeast Asia. They are Dendrocalamus Asper, Dendrocalamus Sericeus, Bambusa Multiplex, and Bambusa Blumena. They are tested for mechanical properties; Tension, compression parallel to grain, compression perpendicular to grain, and bending. Those properties are compared to other tropical hardwood and engineered wood. The result shows that LBL of all species are qualified for medium-hardwood quality, while B.Multiplex lumber performs best overall. The rest still have great mechanical properties and can be qualified some structural lumber in order to reduce the use of timber.