Bamboo’s Bio-inspired Material Design Through Additive Manufacturing Technologies

Bamboo is one of the longest-used organic raw materials in the tropics for a large number of different purposes in the daily lives of human beings. Because of its excellent physical-mechanical properties, in many parts of the world it is widely used as a structural material, especially for the construction of scaffolding and the construction of buildings. The bamboo can be modelled as a composite material, consisting of a of a parenchyma cells matrix, similar to a foam, reinforced by bundles of fibers associated with vessels. The present work aimed to explore the possibility to design a 3D printed biomimetic composite material able of keeping advantages from the bamboo morphological structure. Samples made of PVA, ABS and PVA + ABS were manufactured using Fused Deposition Modelling and tested under compression and bending conditions. The behavior under compression has shown to depend mainly on the material used while in bending the structure has shown important effects leading the sample made of PVA + ABS to have the same performances of much expensive pure ABS.