The effect of elementary fibre variability on bamboo fibre strength

Tensile strength of brittle fibres exhibits statistical distribution and size dependence. In this work, the average strength of bamboo fibre is found to decrease from 568 to 483 MPa as mean diameter increases from 196.6 to 584.3 mu m. The morphologies of bamboo fibres with increasing diameters were investigated through Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) to demonstrate variations in the quantity of elementary fibres. The influence of elementary fibre distributions on the fibre strength was also studied. A modified Weibull model based on number of elementary fibres is proposed to perform scaling predictions for the fracture strength of the fibres at different between-fibre diameters. It was shown that the predicted results are in reasonable agreement with experimental data, highlighting the adequacies of the new analytical model for describing the diameter dependence of tensile strength. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.