ABSTRACT
On a global scale, the fact that forests are being over logged and severely destroyed is attracting worldwide concern for the global environment. Materials that offer alternatives to traditional wood products, such as bamboo, must be considered. In effect, bamboo is one of the fastest renewable plants with about 1250 species (Austin & Ueda 1972; ABS 2008) and a maturity cycle of 3-4 years, thus making it a huge and highly attractive natural resource compared to forest hardwoods. In the construction industry, bamboo has been increasingly adopted as an environmentally acceptable building material for construction projects in many countries over the world because of its super properties like high strength to weight ratio, high tensile strength and other factors like low cost, easy availability and harmless to the environment during service. Recently, many bamboo-based products (e.g. bamboo boards, bamboo mats, bamboo ceiling tiles, and bamboo flooring boards) have been manufactured using laminate technology (Bansal & Zoolagud 2002; INBR 2001). The process involves basic engineering of the bamboo before the manufacture of the specified building materials. Such bamboo-based products, however, were not designed to be used as structural members (e.g. beams, columns, and trusses). These manufactured products have very limited and in some cases no structural capacity. As results, a number of researchers (Ghavami 1995; Yao & Li 2003; Li et al. 2001) have recently investigated different engineering methods for fabricating bamboo composites in attempt to maximize the structural strength of the products.
