Study on the creep behavior of recombinant bamboo based on a modified generalized Kelvin model

Recombinant bamboo is one of the commonly used natural fiber-reinforced composite materials in modern engineering. In this paper, the short-term tensile creep behavior of this material was studied. First, the standard tensile fracture experiments were conducted on nine species to provide the basic strength parameter. Then, six groups of tensile creep experiments were carried out based on the different stress levels. Finally, different viscoelasticity constitutive models were chosen to fit the strain–time relationship obtained by the experiment. The fitting results showed that the traditional generalized constitutive Kelvin viscoelasticity model can express the short-term creep behavior of the recombinant bamboo under high stress levels but will result in some errors in analyzing the creep strain history under the low stress levels. While the proposed modified generalized Kelvin model can provide enough accuracy in fitting the time–strain relationship under all stress levels, it is thus more suitable for engineering applications.