Design Procedure for Reinforced Concrete Beams and Reinforcement Replacement by Bamboo

The use of non-renewable resources by the construction industry has several environmental consequences, contributing to excessive energy consumption and loss of materials. So, the construction sector is always in search of improvement and methods that innovate the existing techniques, aiming at the use of alternative and sustainable materials. Bamboo is a perennial plant with fast growth rate and low cost that has great physical and mechanical characteristics that assure its performance in the building environment. The use of beams with total or partial replacement of steel by bamboo has been well studied, due to the possibility of using the same design methods used in reinforced concrete beams, since the bamboo-reinforced beams meet the Bernoulli-Kirchoff bending theory. The objective of the work was to adapt a design procedure into an electronic spreadsheet for bamboo reinforced concrete beams subjected to four-point bending, with rectangular section, according to Brazilian Standard NBR 6118 (2014). The spreadsheet was tested based on other authors taking into consideration a steel double reinforcement. The resulting values were equivalents to those obtained by the authors, validating the efficiency of the worksheet. This methodology aims to optimize the design process of beams and enable the substitution of steel by bamboo, highlighting the validation, from the structural point of view, obtained by the authors.