Design of Compliant Bamboo Poles for Carrying Loads

Carriage of heavy loads is common in developing countries and can impart large repetitive forces on the body that could lead to musculoskeletal fatigue and injury. Compliant bamboo poles have been used to carry heavy loads in Asia for generations and could be a low-cost, sustainable, and culturally acceptable way to minimize the forces acting on the body during load carriage. Experimental evidence of running with a 15 kg load suspended from a pair of compliant poly(vinyl chloride), or PVC, poles shows that the poles act as a vibration-isolating suspension, which can reduce the peak forces on the body during locomotion. However, it is currently not well-understood how to design and optimize poles for load carrying such that the peak forces on the body are minimized during carrying. Further, current users of bamboo poles do not have a reliable way to measure forces on the body and so cannot empirically optimize their poles for force reduction. Our objective is to determine the geometric and material design parameters that optimize bamboo poles for load carriage and to develop recommendations that could make it easier for load carriers to fabricate well-suited poles. Our approach is to synthesize a predictive model of walking and running from the field of biomechanics, which can predict the peak forces on the body as a function of pole stiffness, with a bending beam model of the bamboo pole that relates pole geometry and material to the effective pole stiffness. We first check our model's ability to predict the experimental results from a well-established study with PVC poles. We then extend the predictive design study to include a wider range of stiffness values and pole geometries that may be more effective and realistic for practical load carrying situations. Based on stiffness, deflection, strength, and pole mass design constraints, we specify an appropriate range of dimensions for selecting bamboo poles to carry a 15 kg load. The design methodology presented could simplify the selection and design of bamboo carrying poles in order to reduce the likelihood of musculoskeletal injury.