Stronger than aluminum, a heavily altered wood cools passively
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This is the best bit. Put enough of this stuff on roofs and it can directly mitigate the greenhouse effect, by emitting IR that goes through the atmosphere and off into space.
Let's not forget cellulose is mostly made of CO2 removed from the atmosphere, which also helps a bit.
The only way it'd be better is if it were also a good material to build PV panels with.
Earth surface area: 510 000 000 km2
1% is 5 100 000 km2
I don't know how much this material reflects back, say it's 50%. So you need 10,2 mil. km2 to reflect back 1% of energy
Total USA land area 9,147,590 km2
You'd need to put roof over the entire USA with this material.
Also currently used materials also reflect something, so that would have to be accounted for, further increasing the needed area.
The comment said 1% would "completely counteract" climate change. You posit that we'd need to cover an area equal to that of the US to reach that 1%, which would mean covering a small % of that area would have roughly that level of positive impact. Am I extrapolating wrongly?
If you're looking for solutions to global warming, look elsewhere. However, that won't stop the marketing team from selling it as such. Evaluate this technology on its merits and take the IR radiation reflection as a bonus.
Diluted hydrogen peroxide is safe but in concentrated form it is one of the most dangerous substances. Early rocketry experiments used it as an oxidizer and it’s generally considered too unsafe.
While there are some storage headaches -- the stuff decomposes slowly no matter what you do, so you must provide for tank venting -- otherwise peroxide is much easier and safer to handle. Its bad reputation is half outright myth and half the result of 1940s experience with seriously impure peroxide. To quote a friend, a rocket-propulsion professional, who investigated the matter as part of a study some years ago:
"As far as we could find out, the stories about problems with peroxide were just that, stories... Peroxide, now, seems to only very rarely do anything exciting, at all. And, even then, it seems to never do many of the things attributed to it in the stories."
Henry Spencer
Wasn't Carmack's rocket company Armadillo Aerospace using hydrogen peroxide for the oxidizer?
They had extreme difficulty sourcing anything but dilute hydrogen peroxide. The few manufacturers refused to sell to them once they discovered the application. I think they ultimately bought a distillation unit made by a man involved in rocket powered drag racers in Mexico.
Ultimately, I think the higher specific impulse of fuel+oxidzer two part systems justified the added complexity and they abandoned monoprops.
As other's have noted, at 3% concentration hydrogen peroxide is pretty benign. At 60% it is quite dangerous. Armadillio Aerospace was exploring 90%+ concentrations.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/10/10/th...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_wood_composites
edit - Since reading about densified wood, I have been wondering about if you can get paper to join to itself using pressure and the right chemicals. If so, you could form it into tubes by rolling it round a metal bar, and maybe even make the laminated paper bicycle from Gibson's Virtual Light.
yes. e.g. commercially available white roof coatings which contain ceramic particles do a pretty good job of cooling a roof and reflecting sunlight.
but it's interesting that this treated wood radiates energy in frequencies that the atmosphere does not absorb
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01...
IIRC the biggest problem with the Grenfell cladding was the combination of flammable insulation + air cavity + flammable cladding. The cladding was not suitable to be used with that particular kind of insulation. Building codes are apparently pretty complex, but not without good reason.