Sustainable bamboo housing for the earthquake prone areas

Bamboo-based housing systems are prevalent as a vernacular type of construction in many parts of the world where bamboo is available locally. Even in India, bamboo-based houses are not so uncommon, especially in the north-eastern part, which is seismically the most vulnerable zone. Structural evaluation, chiefly seismic evaluation, significantly requires a lot of infrastructures. Prohibitively expensive infrastructure cannot be used to evaluate housing systems which themselves are extremely low-cost in nature. There is a need to evaluate the components of a bamboo-based housing system in addition to the full-scale models under seismic loads by using simple and cost-effective facilities. A seismic evaluation of a full-scale bamboo housing system was carried out on two models using a shock table test facility. This helped in identifying the extreme limits of seismic vulnerability of the bamboo-based housing system. From this study, it was observed that the model did not collapse nor did it show any signs of collapse. Also, there were no indications of any tendency of any local collapse of the roofing elements. Hence, it can be concluded that the model had fulfilled the requirement of resisting major levels of lateral forces without losing its stability.