| Summary: | In the composite industry, natural fibres have great potential to replace synthetic fibres like carbon and glass, due to their low cost and environmentally friendly materials. Bamboo is emerging as a versatile reinforcing fibre candidate because this woody plant has a number of advantages, such as being naturally strong, biodegradable and abundantly available. In this study, a compression test with a crosshead displacement rate of 1 mm/min was conducted on square and triangular honeycomb core structures based on bamboo-epoxy composites so as to study their specific energy absorption. Both square and triangular honeycomb structures were manufactured by the slotting technique. Initially, a tensile test with the same crosshead displacement rate was conducted to study the tensile strength of unidirectional bamboo-epoxy composites with 0°, 45° and 90° fibre orientations. Bamboo-epoxy composite laminates were fabricated by applying a hand lay-up technique. The experimental data showed that the unidirectional bamboo-epoxy composite with 0° orientation offered the highest tensile strength. This indicates that the bamboo is stronger when parallel to the tensile axis. Meanwhile, the triangular honeycomb bamboo-epoxy structure offered about 10% more energy absorption than the square honeycomb structure, which indicates that the smaller cell size of honeycomb is able to absorb more energy than the bigger one.
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