Bamboo / Wood Composite Laminates Mechanical Properties Prediction And Structural Optimization

The wood-bamboo laminated panel researched in this article is a new structural panel, which is made of wood veneer and bamboo veneer through hot-press technics. The problem of its deflection and strength was studied in detail.Firstly, the mechanic characters of wood veneer and bamboo veneer were tested by some experiment methods.Secondly, based on analyzing the structural character and its work situations, the principle of minimal potential energy was adopted to deduce the expressions of stress, flexibility, and Elastic modulus under the classic theory and first- order shear deformation theory (FSDT) about deflection of wood-bamboo complex panel. The visual predicting system of mechanical performance of wood-bamboo complex panel was built by using visual basic language.Based on analyzing theories, the problem about the bend of wood-bamboo complex panel was computed with finite element method. The FEM software, ANSYS was used to do all analysis. Some simple introduction of Mindlin shell element, OPT, layer element in ANSYS system were done.The result showed that when ratio of span height was small, transverse shear would impact the bending deflection greatly. However, with the increasing of the creation of span-height, the effect made by transverse shear would decrease , every theory results and numerical results were closed. But as far as bending strength is concerned, the normal stress under the classic theory and first- order shear deformation theory (FSDT) is unanimous, the error between the FEM results and the two theory results is smaller.Thirdly, the Elastic modulus of transverse direction and vertical direction about even number layer (eight layers) and odd number layer (nine layers) wood-bamboo complex panel under different ratio of span-height were determined by testing methods. Compared with theory results, we found that when the ration of span-height was big, the theory results were closed to the experiment results, while, with the decreasing of the ratio of span-height, the error would be biggish.At last, the optimization design for wood-bamboo complex panel structure was done with ANSYS. The results showed that the weight could be lightened by increasing the thickness of wood veneer layers or by reducing the thickness of bamboo veneer.