Scientists develop transparent wood that is stronger and lighter than glass | Hacker News Reader

Scientists develop transparent wood that is stronger and lighter than glass

cbc.ca

89 pointsooboe29 comments

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Posted on HN yesterday as Solar-assisted fabrication of large-scale, patternable transparent wood:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26051883

Dang, missed that.

Dang misses nothing. Dang sees all

Eats, chutes, and leaves

Shoots, not chutes. Otherwise the joke makes no sense. (Pandas eat shoots and leaves).

It could be a skydiver who had a snack in the plane before jumping.

Or a game of Chutes & Ladders, during lunch, in a forest

So it's fiberglass except it uses thin strips of bleached wood in place of the glass fiber substrate?

Also, being lighter than glass (presumably by unit volume?) is a pretty low bar. Glass is heavy. "Stronger" is so vague it's almost meaningless. Stronger under tension? Compression? Flex? Impact resistance? What?

This is a clever variation on impregnation resins, which aren’t now and are getting more and more popular. It will depend on the timber and treatment, but expect higher tensile & compressive strength then the wood, plus more hardness and stability. This would be very interesting for structural windows and likely much cheaper than glass in similar size. Probably better thermal insulation too.

I'd worry about the effects of UV on the resins, if replacing windows with it. Would likely need a coating to prevent discoloration.

Not only discoloration but general structural degradation of the material.

Several mechanical properties are discussed in the published paper:

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/5/eabd7342

I'll also add that marine epoxy is pretty nasty stuff, although there has been innovations there too.

Nile Red did a great video on his attempts to reproduce these results:

https://youtu.be/x1H-323d838

Just watching that now. Nile Red is using an older process. The process described in the article is a new method published 2 weeks ago that is much simpler and leaves most of the lignin in the final product.

I've only recently come across Nile Red, and I highly endorse his videos. I somehow managed to spend over half an hour watching him extract water from epsom salt, and even though it was nearly the equivalent of watching paint dry, it still remained fascinating to watch.

Ironically, it turns out that paint drying is an incredibly complex and fascinating process. Whether it's acrylic, latex, oil or resin-based paint, there are some deep things happening in there.

I actually once got a job (partly) by discussing the chemistry of crosslinking polymerization in oil paint with my future boss.

If you like Nile Red, also check out Cody'sLab and Explosions&Fire. Cody does all kinds of wacky things like drinking diluted cyanide. Explosions&Fire synthesizes all kinds of weird explosives, some of which even scare chemistry professors.

Publication here:

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/5/eabd7342

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd7342

Hair thin anything can look transparent though. I seems to be paper thin.

As building products go, I believe rot resistant glass infused wood as a substitute for pressure treated wood is a more useful product specially in humid regions.

even if it's not completely transparent and can not be used in a window, it could still be useful as a wall material to let some of the daylight into the house.

Especially since it appears to diffuse the light, which is actually desirable in some cases.

Looks like they worked with 1-1.5 mm balsa. sheets. You could make this into plywood. Would be interesting to test this with denser timber.

From the article, the process involves 1mm thick pieces of wood. But it's reasonable to assume that a thicker plywood could then be made out of those 1mm thick pieces and would maintain a lot of the translucency.

I feel like I've seen versions of this news article for years now? Is this an actual breakthrough or will I see one again on a couple of months

This is just epoxy with wood around it.

I'm thinking the military application for this is translucent drones.

I wonder whether or not it blocks certain light frequencies.

I was expecting transparent aluminum Star Trek jokes in this thread. Disappointed!

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