Scientists Have Developed a Way to Make Wood as Strong as Steel

Scientists have developed a new type of “super wood” that is more than 10 times stronger and tougher than normal wood – and this innovation could potentially become a natural and inexpensive substitute for steel and other materials.

more…

This is quite an interesting development. This bit annoyed me though:

“the researchers fired bullet-like projectiles at their new super wood and found they got lodged in the material rather than blasting their way through”

Why wouldn’t the researchers just not fire bullets. :)

sibeen said:

This is quite an interesting development. This bit annoyed me though:

“the researchers fired bullet-like projectiles at their new super wood and found they got lodged in the material rather than blasting their way through”

Why wouldn’t the researchers just not fire bullets. :)

no, cos these “bullet-like” projectiles, are spherical and frictionless.

Your nail gun would probably end up munted.

Bogsnorkler said:

sibeen said:

This is quite an interesting development. This bit annoyed me though:

“the researchers fired bullet-like projectiles at their new super wood and found they got lodged in the material rather than blasting their way through”

Why wouldn’t the researchers just not fire bullets. :)

no, cos these “bullet-like” projectiles, are spherical and frictionless.

‘specially prepared for the research.

Violins.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Scientists Have Developed a Way to Make Wood as Strong as Steel

Scientists have developed a new type of “super wood” that is more than 10 times stronger and tougher than normal wood – and this innovation could potentially become a natural and inexpensive substitute for steel and other materials.

more…

“The new process used here has two steps. First, natural wood is boiled in a mix of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulphite, which is actually similar to the process made to create wood pulp for paper. Next, the wood goes through a compression phase to collapse the walls between individual cells. Heat is added to encourage new chemical bonds while the wood continues to be compressed.”

Something doesn’t look right here. Sodium hydroxide dissolves cellulose, which is why it’s the first step in making rayon, and why it’s used to darken wood, dissolving cellulose and leaving tanins behind. But in paper making, sodium hydroxide dissolves tanins leaving cellulose behind. How can a chemical have two opposite actions?

mollwollfumble said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Scientists Have Developed a Way to Make Wood as Strong as Steel

Scientists have developed a new type of “super wood” that is more than 10 times stronger and tougher than normal wood – and this innovation could potentially become a natural and inexpensive substitute for steel and other materials.

more…

“The new process used here has two steps. First, natural wood is boiled in a mix of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulphite, which is actually similar to the process made to create wood pulp for paper. Next, the wood goes through a compression phase to collapse the walls between individual cells. Heat is added to encourage new chemical bonds while the wood continues to be compressed.”

Something doesn’t look right here. Sodium hydroxide dissolves cellulose, which is why it’s the first step in making rayon, and why it’s used to darken wood, dissolving cellulose and leaving tanins behind. But in paper making, sodium hydroxide dissolves tanins leaving cellulose behind. How can a chemical have two opposite actions?

Newton’s third law?

roughbarked said:

mollwollfumble said:

Sodium hydroxide on wood.
How can a chemical have two diametrically opposite actions?

Newton’s third law?

Murphy’s first law more like. But not even that, because both actions are successfully used in commercial production. Dissolving cellulose in viscose production and dissolving everything other than cellulose in the Kraft paper process.

I want some.

How does it go against white ants?

captain_spalding said:

How does it go against white ants?

Not well, I suspect. You could still CCA it before compression, I suspect. I mean copper chrome arsenic.

mollwollfumble said:

captain_spalding said:

How does it go against white ants?

Not well, I suspect. You could still CCA it before compression, I suspect. I mean copper chrome arsenic.

Well then, steel still has it on one point, at least.

captain_spalding said:

mollwollfumble said:

captain_spalding said:

How does it go against white ants?

Not well, I suspect. You could still CCA it before compression, I suspect. I mean copper chrome arsenic.

Well then, steel still has it on one point, at least.

What has me intrigued is whether the result would still be acoustically recognisable as wood, and whether the compression would allow me to 3-D bend wood to turn a thin flat sheet of wood into the shapes needed for the front and back of a violin.

I guess it would still be flammable.

Would the fumes be toxic?

party_pants said:

I guess it would still be flammable.

Would the fumes be toxic?

Not as flammable as ordinary wood. Why would you want to burn it? Or feed it to termites? At least it wouldn’t rust.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-11/government-saves-$1.4b-in-18-months-since-welfare-crackdown/9419242

Woohoo! We caught one! We caught one! (and only one, the way that reads….)

Sorry

Tau.Neutrino said:

Scientists Have Developed a Way to Make Wood as Strong as Steel

Scientists have developed a new type of “super wood” that is more than 10 times stronger and tougher than normal wood – and this innovation could potentially become a natural and inexpensive substitute for steel and other materials.

more…

They don’t show a picture of what the wood looks like after the process is finished, only a schematic. They don’t give the chemical concentration of processing chemicals, or treatment time. They don’t give the temperature, pressure or time of the hot pressing. And they don’t say what size piece of wood was processed. I also worry about their mathematics, since when does 44.0% + 19.5% + 20.8% = 100% ?

And why didn’t peer review pick this up?

Perhaps great work, perhaps not, but the worst write-up in “Nature” that I’ve ever seen.

!!

They don’t say which timber species they tried it on, either. It’s rather easy to compress balsa that much.

mollwollfumble said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Scientists Have Developed a Way to Make Wood as Strong as Steel

Scientists have developed a new type of “super wood” that is more than 10 times stronger and tougher than normal wood – and this innovation could potentially become a natural and inexpensive substitute for steel and other materials.

more…

They don’t show a picture of what the wood looks like after the process is finished, only a schematic. They don’t give the chemical concentration of processing chemicals, or treatment time. They don’t give the temperature, pressure or time of the hot pressing. And they don’t say what size piece of wood was processed. I also worry about their mathematics, since when does 44.0% + 19.5% + 20.8% = 100% ?

And why didn’t peer review pick this up?

Perhaps great work, perhaps not, but the worst write-up in “Nature” that I’ve ever seen.

!!

I wonder if there’s a better write up elsewhere. Trying a scholar search under the author’s names.

!!

This one comes out of the blue. A supercapacitor made of wood. “All-wood, low tortuosity, aqueous, biodegradable supercapacitors with ultra-high capacitance”.

Another article is about water treatment using wood “Mesoporous, three-dimensional wood membrane decorated with nanoparticles for highly efficient water treatment”

There are also at least three articles on transparent wood, as a replacement for glass.

How transparent wood is made:

“Figure 1a highlights the structure of Type 1 transparent wood, where the open through channels are perpendicular to the plane direction of a piece of wood. Type 1 wood is obtained by radially cutting the wood trunk. Lignin can be removed easily while the cellulose backbone structure is preserved. After lignin is removed, the yellowish wood block becomes white due to the light scattering and the lack of light absorption by lignin. The lumina in the delignified wood now can allow fast infiltration of a refraction index-matching polymer to decrease the light scattering, thus leading to a highly transparent wood composite.”