Super Wood (2018)

This is one of my favorite paths forward for long term CO2 reduction.

About 360 million years ago, there was something called the Carboniferous Period[1]. This was the 60 million year period after wood had evolved, but before anything had figured out how to eat it. Trees just piled up and piled up over the millennia sucking out a ton of carbon from the air and leaving an insanely high oxygen ratio, which lead to the evolution of large, high energy creatures with crazy high metabolisms that wouldn't be sustainable with modern oxygen ratios.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

I love the idea of kicking off a second carboniferous period as we finally realize how to fully utilize the power of wood, and start treating it more like programmable diamond, sucking in the carbon from the air around it, and growing into incredibly strong shapes for any purpose.

As the article mentions, densified wood already exists as a product [1]. But it's basically never used for building materials. As far as I can tell it's main use-case is for electrical transformer support pads and anchorage, as you need a strong, non-conductive material for that. So right now it's a fairly niche product.

I'm not an expert, but as far as I know existing densified wood is basically stronger by virtue of cramming more material closer together - the wood fibers themselves don't change mechanical properties at all, there's just more of them in a given area. So your strength increases are paired with an increase mass as well. If this actually increased the strength of the wood fibers, that would be interesting.

It's an interesting technique, but we already have processed wood products that offer significant strength gains over natural lumber [2], and they haven't displaced regular wood all that much. Normal sawn lumber is often strong enough, and it's just incredibly inexpensive. So it's unclear how much difference another stronger, processed wood product would make to the building market (I can't speak to other uses like body armor or vehicles).

I think long term, the most potential for wood improvement lies with improved trees that grow stronger, faster, and with fewer natural defects. Most agricultural products have been deliberately bred for desirable traits for thousands of years, but we've only just begun to do this with trees. (I wrote more about this here: https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/stronger-faster-c... )

(Source: structural engineer, formerly worked at a mass-timber focused construction startup).

[1] - https://www.roechling-industrial.com/us/products/composites/... [2] - https://www.mjbwood.com/lsl-lumber/#:~:text=LSL%20Lumber%20(....

(2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20965564

Process-wise I think this is an industrial version of what NileRed [0] and prior AvE [1] tried. Pretty cool, if it's truly a durable alternative.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1H-323d838 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=880a_XgvBEo

Several of the new mid-rise buildings in Atlanta, including Facebook's new office building, are all-wood construction using new techniques [1, 2].

This is currently the largest timber building in the US [3], and they've announced they're building more.

I imagine this is going to become booming business.

[1] https://atlanta.curbed.com/2020/3/19/21186363/facebook-atlan...

[2] https://www.ajc.com/business/real-estate/midtown-wood-frame-...

[3] https://structurecraft.com/projects/t3-atlanta

See also,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermally_modified_wood

Great that it can stop a bullet. Can you drive a nail into it? Or operate on it with off the shelf drills and saws?

One of the advantages I didn't see compared was 'machinability' I wonder if you're able to CNC the densified wood in the same way you would as the metals mentioned in the article without compromising it's strength.

I am absolutely ectatic about getting transparent wood windows fitted in my wooden house! That would be so amazing!

... but then I remember how they don't build wooden houses in Palestine :-(

It would be great to see a video of what they're talking about, where they tap/sound/heft the wood and show it live, to illustrate the properties.

Does anyone know if this could be used to build high-rises? I imagine it has enough strength for a 10 story building, but the fire risk might be too high.

This could be interesting for wooden boats as well.

There really needs to be research into breeding or creating trees that grow straight and to tens of meters in the span of a year or two provided a super diet that isn’t naturally found in the ground.

Stronger than steel? At what thickness?

It's cool but is is from 2018; why now?