The influence of heat and chemical treatment on bamboo degradation and aging

Abstract

The objective of this research proposal is to investigate the effect of chemical treatment, heat treatment and, both chemical and then heat treatment on bamboo aging and degradation through measuring the mechanical and physical properties. The tests are divided to three main groups. For the first group, the mechanical and physical properties of bamboo in natural state (NS), after chemical treatment (CT), after heat treatment (HT) and finally after chemical treatment then heat treatment (CT+HT), are measured. For the second group, the mechanical and physical properties after doing the accelerated aging process (AA) for natural state (NS+AA), for chemically treated (CT+AA), for heat treated (HT+AA), and for chemically treated then heat treated specimens (CT+HT+AA) will be measured. For the third group, mechanical and physical properties after degradation (D) for the values of (NS+D), (CT+D), (HT+D) and (CT+HT+D) will be evaluated. For the heat treatment, in addition to ambient temperature, the specimens are exposed at 6 different temperatures from 100°C up to 225°C with the step of 25°C and two different time exposure 3h and 24h. For the chemical treatment the specimens are immersed in a mixture of borax and boric acid. Accelerated Aging test machine is used to simulate the long-term environmental effects in a short term by 200 and 400 wet-dry cycles. The degradation test carried out to realize the effect of biological factors like soil micro-organisms, fungi and molds on bamboo. The images in meso, micro and nano scale before and after degradation and accelerated aging process are prepared by the stereo-microscope, x-ray tomography and scanning electron microscope and after image processing are used to compare the bamboo morphology.