Elasticity of bamboo fiber variants from Brillouin spectroscopy

Bamboo is a fast growing biomaterial that is of great interest as a rapidly renewable structural building material. As such, knowledge of the elastic properties is crucial to its use. Using non-contact, non-invasive Brillouin spectroscopy, we measure the entire elastic stiffness tensor and determine the complete set of elastic moduli of six species of bamboo fiber variants. The Young's moduli, bulk modulus, shear moduli, and Poisson's ratios are determined and shown to scale linearly with fiber density. These results provide the first order elastic properties of several fiber variants of bamboo which is crucial to a thorough understanding of how species variation yields specific elastic properties thereby enabling a complex understanding of the properties of this unique biomaterial.