CANE STRUCTURES WITH FEM

Currently Barcelona is holding a lot of activity in cane structure promoted by krfr collective (www.krfr.org). In a recent conversation with my colleague Oriol Palou (www.sustenta.eu) we discussed about the material properties of cane that are being studied within the School of Building Construction of Barcelona (EPSEB).

This led to a first experiment with FEM which video I show here. This simulates one load test made in EPSEB laboratories, where deflections in the middle of the arch under a 200 kg load were around 30 cm, with purely elastic behavior.
Obviously our model needs some refinement, as I had to load it with 2000 kg to make it deform that much, but the results are somehow encouraging