Ive seen bamboo grown about a meter in a week, but a meter in an hour that has to be wrong.
China saving the rainforest?
- Thread starter Propagandalass
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Engineer
Major
Bamboo as a firewood is a no-no. Bamboo has a lot of air-tight compartments, and when heated, they will explode.
Engineer
Major
Their are simple home cooking stoves that are designed to burn the fuel cleanly. Reducing the Carbon Monoxide better than the traditional fire pit which makes the hole process more energy efficient speeds up cooking times reducing fuel consumption.
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vesicles
Colonel
You can split them open down the middle and open those air-tight compartments?
Today I met with an associate Professor in the Biology department at Wichita State University in Wichita Kansas. I discussed with him about the claim that Bamboo can grow a meter in an hour. The Professor did not believe that any plant could grow that fast on a continual basis. He said that the most likely the person who made that claim in whatever media that was reference might have used the Growth rate, and time it took to grow and averaged it, or they observed a Fluke while observing the growth of one Bamboo plant. He did stress that he did not have any experience with Bamboo and that was just a Guess. I will continue to look for articles that talk about Bamboo.
bladerunner
Banned Idiot
Someone in the Botany Dept specialising in sub tropical plants might have a better idea
His work is in plant biology, and does research on prairie grass for use in bio fuel production.
He is the only person that does any thing remotely similar to Bamboo research on campus.
The Bamboo Builder Yan Xiao found a way to turn China’s abundant and fast-growing bamboo fields into buildings and bridges
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<Innovators 2 of 4>
The Bamboo Builder main: As a child growing up in northern China, Yan Xiao loved flying kites. A born engineer, he made them himself out of paper sails and plain bamboo frames. The kites were durable and cheap. Xiao left China at age 22 to study civil engineering in Japan and the U.S. but returned as a visiting professor at Hunan University in 2002. On a trip to the region’s vast bamboo forests, the memory of those kites gave the 47-year-old Xiao a flash of inspiration: Bamboo was strong enough for kites, but he suspected that it could be fortified to make even sturdier things, like bridges and houses.
Xiao, now an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, scoured textbooks and the Internet, hoping to find historical precedent for structural bamboo. His research had urgency. Most of China has been stripped of timber-worthy trees, so rural buildings are often made of shoddy concrete, which is exactly what led to the catastrophic school collapses during the earthquakes in Sichuan province in May. What Xiao found wasn’t terribly useful: a wealth of arty one-off projects, but nothing a contractor could ever build with.
Bamboo is a remarkable material. Some species have stalks as dense as hardwood. It’s the world’s fastest-growing woody plant, and it’s an exceptionally good absorber of carbon. But its irregular, knotty form is a problem. Making a reliable bamboo structure used to mean picking through stalks to find the ones that met precise measurements. Timber, on the other hand, can be cut to standard sizes. So Xiao set about developing a process to transform bamboo strips into easy-to-manage beams [see “The Sustainable Bridge”]. In 2006 he devised GluBam, bamboo timber sturdy enough for beams and trusses. Last winter, he returned to China and, using just an eight-man crew and no machinery, built a 33-foot GluBam bridge capable of supporting eight tons in the remote, ramshackle Hunan province town of Leiyang. The feat was so surprising, it was covered on China’s national news.
Since then, Xiao has been busy building GluBam houses and classrooms in parts of Sichuan leveled by earthquakes. But he hopes that GluBam’s most positive effect might be an overhaul of the bamboo industry itself. China produces up to a third of the world’s bamboo—Hunan a quarter of that output—but much of it goes to low-value, barely profitable uses, such as concrete molds and chopsticks. GluBam could spark a dynamic industry in China and provide a sustainable replacement for current forestry operations worldwide. “That was the intent all along,” Xiao says. “This could open a vast market. It could create a whole new source of money and jobs.”—Cliff Kuang