Abstract:
As a renewable and green composite material for buildings, bamboo scrimber has the advantages of densified and uniform micro-structure, high strength, variable size and shape and high utilization rate of raw materials. Therefore, bamboo scrimber has a broad prospect in civil engineering. In order to study the quasi-brittle fracture of bamboo scrimber in the transverse direction, three-point-bending tests were carried out on single-edge-notch (SEN) bamboo scrimber samples with different sizes. Based on the boundary effect model (BEM) in fracture mechanics, a quantified relation between the micro-structure and the mechanical properties of bamboo scrimber was established by introducing an important micro-structure parameter—average grain size
G. Its transverse fracture parameters including tensile strength
ft and fracture toughness
KIC were calculated by the peak loads
Pmax obtained from the tests. Then, the normal distribution was adopted to obtain
μf and
μK, the mean value of the fracture parameters as well as to cover the experimental scatters with 96% reliability, with the result as follows:
ft=
μf=216.36 MPa,
KIC=
μK=16.76 MPa·m
1/2. The fracture parameters can be predicted by normal-size samples in the laboratory, and the error between the predicted and tested results is only 3.17%. The fracture parameters tend to increase first and then decrease with the increase of crack length to sample height ratio.