Bamboo Village Hawaii is engaged in various forms of industry related research that will one day lead to standardized building practices with bamboo. Currently in Hawaii you can build temporary structur es or specially approved permanent structures that require the signing off of an engineer and an architect, significantly increasing the costs associated with basic building in our area. The lack of real-world examples and data is one of the major obstacles to developing building codes for Bamboo. Current areas of on-going local research supported by Bamboo Village, using Hawaiian-grown timber bamboos include:

TREATMENT METHODS
Our temparary treatment facility located in Orchidland was built using county grant funds and was based on a model created by the world’s leading expert in the treatment of bamboo, Dr. Walter Leise. Using a non-toxic chemical treatment that is spread throughout the culm via a pressurized value, we greatly reduce the incidence of deterioration from bug and fungus attacks. All of our construction projects and experiments are being carefully monitored in this on-going process of determining what are the best-suited methods for treating timber bamboos in Hawaii’s environment. A permanent and improved treatment plant using this pressurized sap displacement method will be built at our Kamaili Rainforest Site and may be open for use by the public.

FIELD TESTING CONSTRUCTION EXPERIMENTS:
Hoping to demonstrate the numerous possibilities of bamboo construction, beautiful and functional, temporary and permanent structures have been erected here on Big Island by Mr. Pelton and others. Our team periodically monitors these structures for stability, durability and weather wear. The integrity of the materials is tested to ensure safety and to inform future design teams of areas for improvement.

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH:
The University of Hawaii at Manoa has recently constructed a testing laboratory for bamboo and joinery systems. B.V.H. is supplying homegrown treated bamboo and mechanical joinery systems for their tests. These tests will provide the preliminary criteria for values needed to measure strength for engineering the bamboo structures of the future so that an architect or engineer or the building department can evaluate an appropriate design mathematically. Board member, Dean Johnston, is pioneering research in several overlapping areas that should aide in the international movement toward coded building practices with bamboo. His research includes stress-testing the relative strengths of our Hawaiian timber bamboos versus traditional building materials as well as experiments in tissue-culture propagation. Currently, Dean is coordinating species specific research in architecture, entomology, engineering and agricultural sciences, and was recently recognized nationally for the excellence and quality of his work in bamboo research. The exciting news of Mr. Johnston’s preliminary tests indicate that our preferred species of treated tropical bamboos are bug resistant and several times stronger than conventional building materials!

OTHER RESEARCH:
New industrial applications for bamboo are being invented constantly, and the need for on-going research and assessment is immense. For detailed descriptions of important bamboo related research worldwide see the INBAR website at www.inbar.int.