Colmos de bambu como material estrutural na construção civil: aspectos básicos e aplicação teórica em treliças planas

Abstract

Despite the constant technological advancement and the growing search for alternative, sustainable materials with low added energy value, little innovation has been established as a current practice in the civil construction sector in recent decades. Even smaller are those that managed to extrapolate academic barriers and be disseminated to the general public. In this scenario, bamboo is an alternative with underexplored potential, capable of reconciling vernacular knowledge with high efficiency. In this work, bamboo was investigated as a building material, emphasizing its structural use, verifying the main characteristics that define its mechanical behavior. The main national and international normative recommendations that seek to establish parameters for dimensioning bamboo structures were examined, among them the Ecuadorian Construction Standard with Bamboo (Norma Equatoriana de Construção com Bambu or NEC, in Portuguese) and also the Brazilian standard project ABNT NBR 16828-1 “Bamboo Structures Project” (Projeto de Estruturas de Bambu). In order to illustrate the normative procedure proposed by ABNT NBR 16828-1, the verification of a flat bamboo cover element was carried out. The structure was modeled on Autodesk's Robot Structural Analysis software. It can be seen that bamboo is an extremely efficient natural material that, due to its physical, chemical and botanical characteristics, has wide application in the most diverse sectors of civil construction; depending on the species and methods of management and treatment, it can be used safely and comfortably as a structural element.