The vacuum-assisted microwave drying of round bamboos: Drying kinetics, color and mechanical property

Round bamboos hold great promise for replacing wood as structural materials due to their easy large-scale cultivation, rapid growth, high strength and high toughness. However, rapid drying of round bam-boo with good quality remains a key challenge.Here, vacuum-assisted microwave drying (VMD) technol-ogy is firstly applied to dry round bamboo. It only takes ~150 min to reduce the moisture content ofbamboo to ~10%.The resulting dried bamboos not only have a smooth surface, superior gloss, uniformgolden color and few striking defects., but also show good mechanical performance. Moreover, few split-ting, cracking., even“Firecrackers" occur during the drying process, which could not be avoided by con-ventional drying method. Thus,VMD technology shows a great potential application in drying roundbamboo in industry.