Roof Structure of Bamboo for Solar Panels

Abstract: Sustainable urbanisation is a pressing challenge in some parts of the world and cost-efficient and environmentally friendly building materials could become a solution to achieve sustainability. Bamboo has shown promising properties in tensile- and bending strength to be able to substitute conventional building materials. If reinforced concrete gets implemented inside the anisotropic bamboo it further increases compressive strength, raw durability and makes the material more homogeneous.This thesis report analyses and calculates the stress and deformation on these reinforced bamboo beams when used as a roof structure for a solar cell power charging station in Southeast Asia. The calculations were made in ANSYS Mechanical. Different structural designs were exposed to strong wind loads and the results were compared to optimize the usage of the materials.The results show low values of stress and deformation after implementing reinforced concrete in the whole bamboo which indicates that excessivelyreinforced concrete might have been used. The results also show that using bamboo only in the structure gives considerably higher stress and deformation values even reaching critical levels at the edges of the roof and where the roof connects with the structural pillars.By implementing reinforced concrete at only critical areas the amount of stress in the structure can be decreased to a manageable level. If this is done, no critical levels are reached and the arising stress levels in the bamboo fall below a safety factor of 3. With these results, one can argue to decrease the material usage by only using reinforced concrete at critical areas of the structure. By using the natural strength of bamboo and only complementing with concrete and steel where bamboo is weak, the overall environmental impact is kept low but also the costs for producing and transporting these materials.