Fibreglass Rebar Testing

01 18 2011

Together with engineers Dr. Dagmar Svecova and Payam Nabipay, the Cocoon team completed some exciting tests of the rebar at the Civil Engineering and structures lab yesterday.

photo: Lancelot Coar

We tested the strain on the bars given several dimensions of bending diameter/radius. 

photo: Lancelot Coar

We used strain gagues to test this at the top of the bar.  The test was to see if the current bending that we are using on the structure (aprox. 2.2m in diameter or 1.1m in radius) is within 25% of the allowable strength (building/design code).  It was very exciting to discover that our current bending only puts about 19% stress on the bars!  In fact from the pictures you can see that the bending that we were able to test to was about a 1.2 m diameter or .75m radius which only caused the material to stress to about 22%-25% allowable stress.

Anyway, this is very good news and we are continuing to modify and advance the design and fabrication of the material, and we are discovering that our intuition and design method is within the range of conventional design loads on the rebar.

(with text from Lancelot Coar)