Design and construction of curved bamboo structure

Abstract

Chinese have used bamboo for buildings since 12,000 BC. To further prompt the use of bamboo, conventionnal Chinese craftsmanship skills and promotion on sustainability, a bamboo shell structure was constructed in Hong Kong.There are no codes of practice are available for the analysis and design of bamboo structures. Therefore, most bamboo structures are mainly constructed by means of experience instead of design formula or engineering method. When bamboo is used in lattice shell structures, the controlling factor for design will mainly be the local and overall instability of bamboo rather than the strength of bamboo. A step forward to a better design of bamboo structures is using nonlinear geometric second-order analysis as the key numerical tool to check the stability of the structure. Through this analysis, engineers can now have a better understanding of structures' behaviour and performance and can hence determine the size of bamboo elements, anchors, foundations, etc. In addition, the analysis in this paper considers initial imperfection in both members and structures.This paper focusses not only on the nonlinear analysis method used for a double curved bamboo shell structure, but also covers the construction challenges for making curved members and lapping bamboo in space.