Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic
cell.com
cell.com
Very reminiscent of the supposedly renewable & sustainable bamboo products that are anything but. I love bamboo, but flooring should make you think "plywood" not "waving groves of fast-growing giant grasses". It's another glue and epoxy thing.
Update: https://phys.org/news/2021-10-hardened-wooden-knives-slice-s... is a much better source.
If the glue used is either sustainable or they don't use very much of it, and the bamboo is grown locally, what makes it less sustainable than using wood? And certainly more less energy-intensive than steel.
※ I am not a woodworker, don't know terminology.
1; https://www.bambooimport.com/en/how-is-bamboo-lumber-made
https://planettimbers.com.au/2014/06/25/timber-wear-tear-and-hardness-including-janka-ratings/
"Even though a Janka rating of 8 is considered ‘hard’,
many Australian timber species achieve ratings of 12
and above."
As it happens I live in Australia, and so have tried to bang the odd nail into an old house, which are often made from Australian hardwood. Almost all of us live in new houses made from pine, and so all make the same mistake. If you are lucky, and after more than a few bent nails, some old codger will take pity on you and tell you it isn't possible. You have to pre-drill.
As a general rule, the structural properties of wood can’t really be changed without just injecting a shit load of petroleum products[0], which isn’t really what we’re after here. If a type of wood, bamboo or otherwise is too soft for an application, then there really isn’t a way to “harden” it. This is the reason we tend to use hard species for flooring, such as oak, as you need to rely on the natural characteristics of the wood for strength and hardness.
0 - For example OSB, which is basically 5% oil by weight. Even still, our ability to adjust some properties is limited. OSB is strong and cheap, but it’s not that much harder than the wood species it was made from, and hardness is a desirable property for flooring to resist dents. Also, OSB is ugly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_glue
https://americacomesalive.com/elmers-glue-the-surprising-sto...
"The significant disadvantages of hide glue – its thermal limitations, short open time, poor gap filling capability and vulnerability to micro-organisms – are offset by several advantages. Hide glue joints are reversible and repairable. Recently glued joints will release easily with the application of heat and steam. Hide glue sticks to itself, so the repairer can apply new hide glue to the joint and reclamp it. In contrast, PVA glues do not adhere to themselves once they are cured, so a successful repair requires removal of the old glue first – which usually requires removing some of the material being glued."
One old trick was hemp plastic.. I'm not sure what was bad about it since nobody tried it again since Ford made a prototype car body with it.
Guy in my state on YouTube has one and takes it to car shows, or used to. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhpIgM6TpwA)
> After the material is processed and carved into the desired shape, it is coated in *mineral oil* to extend its lifetime.
I was thinking how, surely, mineral oil isn't food-safe and well-fit for use on a utensil. However, it turns out that while low-grade mineral oil is proved carcinogenic, the high-grade version is not believed to be so, unless dispersed in a mist. And apparently, we consume quite a bit of mineral oil due to it's use in the baking industry (though that figure comes from 1961)
Mineral turpentine is to be much preferred over the natural one because the latter contains organic wood terpenes many if which are toxic and proven carcinogens - after all it stands to reason that they're dangerous, as trees have evolved to produce them to fend off or poison insects that attack them.
I find it somewhat distressing to see so many carpenters and woodworkers using terpenes-laced turpentine because they believe 'natural' is better.
It's time this dangerous myth was dispelled.
Whilst flammable, and for the simplest ones, even explosive - most small straight-chained alkanes as often found in mineral oils are reasonably innocuous in that they're not considered organically poisonous (at least in small amounts), however that can change greatly the moment you add certain additives to change their properties (as is often done in commercial products).
The most notorious and outrageous example being when Thomas Midgley Jr added tetraethyllead to gasoline/petroleum in the 1920s thus managing to poison most of the population to at least some extent.
But will we see a wooden laptop?
That said, It seems like the sort of thing you'd want to spray asphalt shingles with.
Remember that everything that's always outside will be subjet to death by the sun.
Hard materials are usually brittle materials that fail suddenly. How tough is it? ie. Can it accept some deformation without significant weakening and will it stretch or crack prior to failure?
What is its compressive strength? What is it's tensile strength? Could it be used to reinforce concrete? Pipe liquids or gases? Does it's strength drop when it gets wet?
How dense is it? How flammable is it? How easy is it to machine without damaging it?
And of course the big one - how much does it cost?
[1]https://corporate.arcelormittal.com/sustainability/climate-a...
Steel doesn't pull carbon out of the air, unfortunately.
The raw materials to manufacture it are mostly hydrocarbons. Maybe we should be focusing on making "green epoxy" instead.
I think growing trees is better than just capturing CO2 directly as growing a large forest might have other advantages and a lot of wood can be used for normal human industry as well.
It's not an insurmountable level of effort per person, but if you try to do it on a large scale you inevitably end up with logistical problems, and it would require quite a lot of space.
Edit: strike that I see what you meant there with the a day. I just should have actually read what you wrote before I commented.
Also, they can't even get people to wear a mask or take a shot. Getting all these people to plant trees seems like an insurmountable task.
Actually 20 million trees every 2 days doesn’t sound that ridiculous. Especially as we build more green infrastructure and reduce the daily emissions.
https://www.greenandgrowing.org/how-many-trees-are-planted-e...
If we had an actual price on carbon seaweed production would be a boom industry.
EDIT: After some research I found an interesting article addressing this: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/19/1035889/kelp-car...
No need to drop it to the bottom of the ocean though. Just build something out of it.
"At comparable ages and spans, smaller percentages of prestressed concrete bridges are classified "structurally deficient" than steel or timber bridges."[1]
https://www.rcinet.ca/en/2019/02/26/u-s-use-of-toilet-paper-...
Wood is biodegradable, renewable, and recyclable. It can be grown and harvested sustainably; I know because I used to work with a guy who made a living off surveying forestry for sustainable timber harvesting.
It causes no environmental issues if left to rot, doesn't have to be disposed of in a particular way.
The vast majority (well over 90%) of plastic is not recycled.
Plastic never goes away. Plastic just breaks down into microparticles that are now so pervasive there's basically no part of the planet that doesn't have microplastics, no animal that doesn't have them in its digestive system. And all the while, it's leeching out toxic chemicals.
The thing is, once we start looking at wood in detail, it's never just wood. It's wood, plus adhesives, paints, and finish. You can't use just wood because it rots - you at least need to add some pigment to block UV rays and drainage to limit water pooling. Each of those additives are a potential source of VOCs(volatile organic compounds, the term that more accurately describes "chemicals"). And each step taken during processing adds energy cost. Paper and corrugated cardboard are not innocuous - they use one of the higher-energy processes relative to the amount of input material.
When you look at what you can do besides wood, you get similar tradeoffs. Stone is great, but it's still hard to work with directly, hard enough to not scale to our industrial population - as it stands, you need an artisianal economy of stonemasons to make those huge ancient constructions. Concrete has a huge climate footprint and the dust is a major VOC source. Steel is high-energy and not abundant enough to be used everywhere.
Thus, plastics enter as a way of getting some of the qualities we want. Plastics are not all one of a kind and have varying VOC content. We can't afford not to use them to have this population and quality of life, which means we have to study how to use them safely. The microplastic issue is a part of that, but it's oversold as "plastic is scary". Wood smoke is also scary, as anyone who has been around a wildfire will attest.
Also petroleum being a big factor in CO2 levels it's hard to not put it first isn't it ?
Somehow there is a synergy here we haven’t quite accessed.
Burn petroleum => release CO2 => tree grows, sequesters CO2 => use tree for something that doesn’t burn it or compost it …
I feel like we are on the edge of figuring this out.
Aluminum has been growing into that role of "steel alternative", but there's still room for other alternatives.
There is a new Titanium process, not as cheap as I would like, but a lot better than we have now. https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-021-00166-8
Supposedly Napoleon III had aluminum tableware for his most honored guests, and gold for everyone else.
Magnesium is also better at casting components with thinner walls and tighter tolerances than aluminum. However, even with the many advantages of magnesium, aluminum remains a less expensive alternative for die casting.
[0]: https://diecasting.com/blog/the-difference-between-aluminum-...
Secondly Aluminium is normally alloyed with other metals bringing the two even closer.
Finally it's a light, strong metal and used in many similar industrial products as Aluminium.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-14/aluminum-...
I've been using a lot of MDF lately, and it's interesting to think that it's just sawdust and glue. It makes me wonder: are there other fibers which could be used in a similar process which would yield better materials than MDF?
It must use wood compression at very high pressures, which collapses the cell walls in the wood and results in a densified high-strength wood.
There have been various methods to make densified wood for structural applications, but I assume that this is an improved process, which makes an even denser and more homogeneous material, which ensures that even blades can be made from it.
Edit: According to Phys.org, the improvement over the previous processes is a treatment in a chemical bath that removes the lignin and other components of the wood, leaving only the cellulose, before the compression.
This removal of the non-cellulose components ensures that the densified wood is harder and with less defects than those made with the older processes.
Yeah, maybe. But you're right, when it comes to metals, steel's vastly most substantial component, iron is about the most abundant metallic element in the universe, so it ain't gonna disappear from our manufacturing materials list anytime soon.
Iron and steels have their obvious problems - rust for instance, bad performance high high temperatures is another and it'd be nice if iron had properties more like say titanium but that's wishful thinking.
Taming iron to behave the way we want it to has always been and still is a major problem. For example, stainless steel is expensive and it's always been a bit of a kludge (the need for hundreds of different varieties of alloys attest to that; same goes for hardness, for instance, the many tool-steel-like alloys that are needed by industry).
If anything, we need considerably more material science research to make iron alloys much better than they are now and thus make them appear very sexy to everyone's eyes.
Forests have a lot of decaying and decomposing deadfall wood but still seem to be a carbon sink so it may be a layering thing...
If all you want is to add organics, you'd probably fork in manure.
Meanwhile they liberate oxygen, which I enjoy daily.
What I like about this idea is it's a way to take carbon out of the air while manufacturing something. We are going to have to deal with carbon no matter what, why not manufacture things with it?
Good reads, if this area interests you, are Fernand Braudel Civilization and Capitalism Vol 1: The Structures of Everyday Life and Vaclav Smil Energy and Civilization: A History.
Wood chip heating already has that problem
Not at the scale at which the world needs steel.
It's not that we can't design buildings to last longer, it's that you don't want to design a building to last two centuries when you know it's probably going to be torn down in 50 years no matter what shape it's in.
If a building is made harder to demolish than its neighbours it's got a better chance to survive. I plan plutonium-core concrete walls for my mausoleum to prevent future generations from interfering with it.
This is priceless. love it.
Also I'm doubting "minimal processing" for steel. You have to dig up the ore with giant machines, transport huge amounts of it by train, smash it with a lot of energy and heavy equipment, melt it with a lot of energy and heavy equipment, etc., etc. This seems like the opposite of minimal?
Steel is perfectly recyclable, but even then there is plenty of iron on earth. We won't be running out of iron.
Edit: Of course, steel is just a name of class of alloys - some of the steel types have a rarer elements like Mo, Ti, V...
Plus, steel is entirely recyclable. And it has some natural properties that make is relatively easy to recycle. It can be sorted with magnets, and it has a higher melting point than most impurities.
This way you get to reuse all the (enormous) existing infrastructure, as well.
We live on a thin crusty shell around a ball of iron.
Nevertheless, the mantle is made of a mixture of iron oxides, silicon dioxide and magnesium oxide, with small quantities of the other elements, so under the thin crust, even if there remain thousands of kilometers until the iron ball, there is nonetheless what is essentially a huge amount of iron ore.
... which is way beyond our reach.
On earth it replenishes too via meteorite strikes and by nuclear decay. I'm not sure was decays into iron, but I'm sure it's most things, given its name as the most stable element
Mind you, rust is quite similar to iron ore
> HempWood is priced competitively to similar cuts of black walnut. You can purchase 72" HempWood boards for between $13 and $40 as of the date of publishing. HempWood also sells carving blocks, cabinets, and kits to make your own table. Prices for table kits range from $175 to $300. Jul 5, 2021 […]
> Is Hemp Wood Healthy? Due to its organic roots and soy-based adhesive, hemp wood is naturally non-toxic and doesn't contain VOCs, making it a healthier choice for interior building.
> Hemp wood has also been tested to have a decreased likelihood of warping and twisting. Its design is free of any of the knots common in other hardwoods to reduce wood waste.
FWIU, hempcrete - hemp hurds and sustainable limestone - must be framed; possibly with Hemp Wood, which is stronger than spec lumber of the same dimensions.
FWIU, Hemp batting insulation is soaked in sodium to meet code.
Hopefully the production and distribution processes for these carbon sinks keeps net negative carbon in the black.
That does look like there's still a lot of manual labor in the depicted production process... Automation and clean energy.
Their "hardened wood" product is 23 times harder than "natural" basswood. When dried, basswood (aka lime) is an extremely soft hardwood. It's very popular with novice turners and hand carvers. When green (natural?) you can carve it with a stone.
Species matters. Lignum vitae is 20 times harder than basswood.
Balsa is a hardwood, too.
So I guess the achievement here is that commonly available inexpensive wood can be made as hard as rare expensive wood.
I think they might have just been highlighting basswood because it's so soft —softer than many softwoods— and so the outcome shows a much bigger improvement.
Show me pine/spruce, poplar and oak.
Naturally, the harder of the hardwoods (IPE, Brazilian Teak, Ebony) are also relatively low-lignin wood types (that also grow relatively slowly, sensitively or in unfavorable geographical regions for logging and transport) and the result of removing the non-lignin would logically yield a lower improvement factor (and possibly take longer).
In general, the difference between softest readily-available lumber (such as basswood/spruce) and hardest (IPE) is about one order of magnitude. The result of this study at 23x means basswood can be made more than twice as hard as the hardest hardwood that is reasonably available. It would likely take a lot of lumber weight input though (explained below).
To your comment: Most common timber/lumber woods (softer: spruce, red pine, fir, chestnut, tamarack/larch and medium: cedar, maple, oak, birch) are rapid-growing and have established forestry industry around them. If you were to take white pine or spruce it should yield similar results to the study since you're basically condensing it to cellulose and they have similar weight densities. You would need to also factor the density of the wood since yield would be ratio of cellulose * weight of the source wood.
Since this is a high-waste process (only 40% of the weight is kept in the final product which is then compressed to the target density of 10000lbf or so) it would probably make most sense when using waste-wood as input (wood chips, sawdust, offcuts, recycled wood) and not on viable timber. This is similar to LVL and OSB (although it uses glue for binder)
Some composition comparisons:
Nordic Spruce: 39.5% Cellulose [1], 0.43 kg/m3 [5] (the poster child for engineered lumber construction in europe)
Black Walnut: 47.7% Cellulose [2], 0.63 kg/m3 [5]
Brazilian Teak: 53.0% Cellulose [3], 1.05 kg/m3 [5]
Basswood: 42.7% Cellulose [4], 0.41 kg/m3 [5]
[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/13/10/1619/pdf#:~:text=Sjostr....
[2] https://yadda.icm.edu.pl/yadda/element/bwmeta1.element.agro-...
[3] https://bioresources.cnr.ncsu.edu/resources/color-and-chemic...
[4] https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/pdf2019/fpl_2019_jia001.p... (pretty cool that they can make the basswood transparent to a significant extent also).
[5] https://cedarstripkayak.wordpress.com/lumber-selection/162-2...
The World's Tallest Timber Buildings [1],
Why Finland is Building a Wood City [2].
Why There Are No Timber Skyscrapers [3],
Why All Buildings Should Be Timber [4]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3JqSsc8ZKk
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4QYkEpw9pA
[0]: https://www.nps.gov/wrst/learn/historyculture/kennecott-mine...
A desalination plant can be run when the sun is out and the end product (clean water) can be stored and used. In this instance, the hardening step stores energy in the final product. Just run that step at the right time.
Except, of course, cryptocurrency isn't nearly as useful as, say, desalinated water.
I'd like to expand on this a bit.
The major problem with cryptocurrency is that the value of a typical coin seems to be ~ the cost of electricity needed to mine one.
This means that a crypto miner turns $1 of energy into ~$1 of wealth.
As far as business plans go, this is an absolutely horrific use of energy. Nearly no other business produces so little wealth, for such a high energy input.
The economy in general, by the way, turns $1 of energy into ~$17 of wealth. [1]
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36754#:~:tex....
Everyone who buys the coins are just helping to remove the pandemic stimulus from the economy, which I suppose is its own sort of good.
Heresy!!
It's useful to think of industry as a three factor limitation of energy, materials and intelligence[1] -- you are sort of always limited by one of them. If energy was of literal no concern, we could promptly utilize very inefficient carbon capture or even synthesize elements. Solar energy still has significant costs in labor (what I call intelligence) and materials, both of which are finite. We will always as a civilization be managing those factors, even with a seemingly unlimited source like a feasible fusion reactor (which would require an advanced highly costly and finite reactor to produce energy) to solar panels (which outsource the fusion to some 150 million km away producer :) )
A quick googling gives me about 24 MJ/kg for steel production. A compression cycle with, for example, 1cm of displacement would need to exert 2.4 GN or about 24 million tons of kg-force over a 1kg sample to use equivalent energy, which I believe is far above any press in existence.
[1] Indeed we know the first two are equivalent via E=mc^2 , however this conversion constant is essentially prohibitive outside of stellar nucleus. We also know the third one, intelligence, can be built from raw materials and energy, so there's also a conversion factor there.
Executive summary of its qualities:
- Stronger and lighter than concrete. Think thinner floors and walls but with similar strength and load-bearing capability; less tonnes of material to move around. That alone is a big advantage.
- Several buildings across the world already exist; more are being planned. So, its beyond the proof of concept stage but still early days in terms of adoption.
- A few ambitious skyscrapers are being planned that will be built using it. So, instead of steel and concrete, these would be mostly made out of wood. Needless to say these will be very prestigious buildings; which should count as an advantage as well.
- While it uses glue, it's not nearly as much as e.g. MDF; in the order of a few percent. It's mostly wood basically. The cross lamination is what gives it its strength. E.g. toxicity associated with MDF and similar materials is not much of a concern.
- It's quite safe from e.g. a fire safety point of view and should also be usable in e.g. earthquake zones like Tokyo (which has a 350 CLT building planned). It's also quite durable (e.g. rot & humidity).
- It's a nice way to capture carbon, obviously. As opposed to dumping massive amounts of carbon needed for e.g. concrete production and transport. So, very environmentally friendly. Also after demolition (it's wood basically).
- You can work it using traditional wood working tools. Hammers, nails, saws, etc.
- You can do a lot of this offsite as well and ship prefab components to the construction site. So, there is less waste on site of material that needs to be removed after. Existing construction work involves extensive use of power tools and produces enormous amounts of waste.
- As a side effect of that: faster & more efficient construction. This is a big plus point as construction sites in busy cities are very disruptive.
- Short term its somewhat more expensive than traditional construction methods (concrete). But long term there is plenty of potential for cost reductions due to scaling, learning effects, etc. Large scale CLT production simply does not yet exist.
- The wood needed to produce it could feasibly be produced using sustainable foresting. But obviously that would be a sector that would need to be scaled up. However, if done right, that in itself is a good thing. It would basically mean countries investing in sustainable forestry, which has all sorts of nice side effects in terms of carbon capture, nature, and jobs.
The biggest hurdles are not so much technical feasibility but just changing an industry used to a particular way of working along with its supply chains to work in different ways using different supply chains. That kind of thing does not happen overnight. But with the advantages listed above, there is plenty of interest in this.
Prefab/offsite fabrication can be done with most building types, it's always a tradeoff of many factors: transportation costs generally go up, onsite labor and onsite construction time goes down, offsite labor and construction time becomes a thing, precision usually goes up since the offsite construction is often in a more controlled environment, site specific adjustments can be more difficult depending on the specific methods. If there are standardized pieces, that can reduce overall time to complete a project if there's some amount of warehousing rather than building just in time; offsite construction may also speed up projects when there's more capacity to build components in a factory setting(s) than with onsite labor.
For concrete offsite fabrication, you're looking for words like 'precast' and 'tilt-up'.
I've heard firefighters talk about how their departments are considering scaling back entries on newer homes because those beams can fail so early in a fire when the binder fails.
> FPInnovations is a private not-for-profit R&D organization that specializes in the creation of solutions that accelerate the growth of the Canadian forest sector and its affiliated industries to enhance their global competitiveness
Did you read the fucking introduction? It's an industry-paid-for shill study:
> Financial support for the development of this US edition of the CLT Handbook was provided by the Bi-National Softwood Council, US Forest Products Laboratory and Forest Innovation Investment. Financial support for conducting the fire resistance test series on cross-laminated timber (CLT) was provided by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) under the Transformative Technologies Program, which was created to identify and accelerate the development and introduction of products such as CLT in North America. FPInnovations expresses its thanks to its industry members Julie Frappier, Eng. from Nordic Engineered Wood and Andre Morf from Structurlam, Dr. Nourredine Bénichou of the National Research Council of Canada, NRCan (Canadian Forest Service), the Provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and the Yukon Territory for their continuing guidance and financial support.
I guess it must be the steel industry planting astroturfers in reddit comments pretending to be firefighters talking about how they're seeing new construction buildings with engineered structural wood fold stunningly fast, huh?
https://www.fastcompany.com/90545929/mass-timber-is-the-futu...,
https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/collegeofforestry/2018/03/27/p... (demonstrating that charred CLT can maintain structural integrity at temperatures that could cause steel structures to soften and collapse. Or in other words, that steel structures can be less safe in the event of a fire than a wood structure.
Using cheaper materials for low rise might indeed be an issue. Also, living in houses that are mostly low quality plywood and other flammable materials is of course not great for fire safety. It's a tradeoff between cost, requirements, and regulations.
Even concrete buildings sometimes collapse when fire gets hot enough. Metal loses its strength when it gets warm enough. The collapse of the Twin Towers in New York are a pretty grim example of that.
It’s easy to assume we “just” need subsidies and incentives (or the ending of same) for “green” solutions, but the problem is much larger than that. We need to be operating “sustainably” at every level, in between departments, across legislation.
If regulation is blocking us, get it changed. If changing legislation is too slow, refactor. We must go faster.
"Sorry your house fell down, but we never thought to test this stuff at temperatures that low. I mean, we thought Texas was a hot place!"
Compared to the damage that hurricanes do in the US to flimsy plywood buildings, it will probably more than be able to compete with that. Building standards are perhaps slow to change but not necessarily very advanced in the US. But you are right that this type of change is slow to implement.
for the record, i dislike this style because it reserves the most valuable square footage—the ground floor—to cars. the cars should go underground, allowing the ground floor to be used for human purposes—ideally mixed use, even just publicly accessible studio space for creatives.
>Lignin is what makes wood rigid and brown. Somewhat counterintuitively, Hu and his team removed the wood's lignin polymers in order to make their wood even stronger.
>The lingin removal allowed the team to compress the wood under a mild heat of around 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Without the lignin binding together the wood's cells, the scientists were able to make its cellulose fibers very tightly packed.
>When the fibers are jammed together...the wood's fibers begin to form hydrogen bonds.
So essentially they found a different (more natural-sounding for sure) way to polymerize cellulose. Right now bamboo or sugar cane are broken down and polymerized all the time via a different process to make plant-based plastics, rayon, etc.
I think this is an article describing the same process, with more detail than the abstract above. A quick ctrl+f lists Teng Li's name in both so probably the same research group. (Originally found on /. several years back)
The resin process has definite downsides though... I'm curious about the chemical process involved in this proposal. Historically, chemical treatment of wood has been a significant source of environmental contamination. Although modern precautions reduce this problem, it'd be a big step forward if the chemicals involved here are pretty safe.
This won't provide the same density this study has achieved, but it'll give you a quick proof-of concept for next to no cost.
In the article I believe they also chemically alter the wood by removing lignin with a boiling sodium hydroxide solution. Basically dissolving out the 'dead weight' and leaving more cellulose, which is what's giving wood most of its strength.
They do also use physical compression under heat, which wouldn't be too hard to achieve with mere run to home-depot, but I'm not sure how much effort you want to put into this as of now.
It would be great to get an understanding of its performance specs. I may be able to specify hardened wood in place of steel, aluminum, magnesium machined parts in high-end ecologically conscious consumer products... but not without some understanding of the engineering specifications and a source of material.
From what I've read, I'd expect it to behave similarly (in yield/toughness/hardness) to cast aluminum but with a tendency to split along the grain still, for machining purposes. So fairly hard, but not super ductile. The density will be in the same ballpark as magnesium if my math is right.
But... 'ecologically conscious' won't mean anything until production can be scaled up. When you're measuring things in raw carbon-footprint, it won't be able to break even with recycled pop cans merely due to the low-quantity batches they're processing now. It could be viable in mass production based on a previous article I read in Nature. The process seems simple enough that I could replicate it in my garage with some effort, so I think there's some potential there. It's just a question of whether it can beat traditional metals economically, with a slight edge in aesthetic appeal for your high-end customers.
In terms of edge-retention there just isn't a good alternative to steel atm. This wood will likely preform around the same as unhardened steel or aluminum, So it'll cut but you'll need to sharpen it frequently.
If you're looking more for fancy-pants artistic appeal and don't mind high price, there's always obsidian blades out there from small-time makers. They'll be about as good as ceramic sharpness-wise, but look a lot nicer IMO.
Perhaps it would be better if we stop over commodifying trees in general and try to reduce our reliance on them and hopefully partitioning them off from the economy could encourage regrowth
There's the issue of disappearing rainforest in the amazon, but that's largely due to the fact that growing food is a more valuable use of that land than forest, and has nothing to do with the economic value of the wood on the land.
[0] as an example only a knife made out of plastic bottle material (should be PE): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZnT31JeBTg
Thanks to Cell Press for extracting profit to hold back scientific progress.)
Anyway I presume this relates to the group's previous work, where they boil the wood in sodium hydroxide to leach the lignin and then compress it. The final product doesn't have any resin additives, so is not a composite.
Alloys and ceramics are non-renewable? Aren't they pure mineral?
It's nice to have functional carbon sinks and all, but we will never replace even the majority of petrol, metallic and mineral based production of today with biomass derived alternatives. The surface and geological cycles cannot support that. And food is priority. If phosphorus rock is gone, we're fucked for good.
We need to cut down.
A potential alternative survival strategy is to develop your country as fast as possible. Develop whatever technology will be necessary to win a potential future war fought over the scarcest resources. This development oriented strategy will probably consume a lot of resources, but survival is worth taking risks for.
We also need to develop tech (weather technique or technology) to reconstitute waste and refuse into the inputs for our food, buildings, transportation, etc.
It's worse than that: We fully rely on borrowed time!
Natural geological cycles to restore surface phosphorus span many thousands of years. Our current agriculture (food production) critically depends on mineral phosphorus, which may be exhausted in just four or five decades. And we retain none of that, but flush our soils into the oceans (partially through the toilet, literally). No phosphorus, no food. I wish everybody knew about peak phosphorus. (It's also a geopolitical near future issue as almost all phosphate rock is located in Morocco...)
> We also need to develop tech (weather technique or technology) to reconstitute waste and refuse into the inputs for our food, buildings, transportation, etc.
Yes! We also need to collect and recycle human and livestock feces and urine to prevent mineral loss. Those cannot leak from the ecosystems anymore - madness!
Honestly, I think it's possible humanity will barely not make it, comically, because no one wants to lobby for collecting people's shit, while everything else goes full Star Trek.
Ironically in Star Trek, the food from the replicator is made from human waste or that's what they say in recent seasons anyways.
I am optimistic about the ability for us to recycle human waste despite the lack of popularity though. Most people have no idea what goes on at water/sewage treatment facilities and they don't really care. Even with no regulation or subsidy, it will eventually become profitable to recycle this waste b/c of geopolitical issues like you mentioned.
I'm pretty worried that we wont be able to cut back on consumption though and will end up buried in piles of our own junk.
Plants get phosphorus from soil, animals get it from plants, predators from other animals, and finally microorganisms from our all remains. But it all starts with plants. We cannot grow "low phosphorus" food plants or anything. It's used in ADP and DNA synthesis! Phosphorus sits at the core of life itself. Every living cell on earth depends on what plants can extract from soil.
It seems then we need to avoid competition with food.
TTrough human history predictions of us running out of resources did not materialize
I think wood itself contains little phosphorus, compared to other parts of the plant. The inner rings of a tree are dead cells, a formerly living tissue, which condensed to cellulose and lignin. I assume the plant will not have phosphorus left there substantially. Phosphorus is needed to make ADP and DNA, by all living things, and is used in photosynthesis by plants, too. Quite useless in the middle of the dead wood zone. In woody plants, only the outer layers and leaves are living cells. If you leave those in the forest to rot, you retain some phosphorus.
You could also burn furniture after a century of use for energy and then bring the ash back into the forest to close the cycle, I guess. But that's requires non-toxic ashes - compatible paints and glues, no heavy metal agents and so on.
Either way, you are in competition with agriculture land use for food production. And bio fuels. And bio polymers. And bio... You get the idea.
Tho, if I had to guess, I would say wood probably is not the worst in terms of phosphorus leakage.
As far as I know there isn't a shortage of iron ore. This hardened wood is solving a problem that we don't have yet.
What do you think happens, if we continue as we do, but assume "infinte" ressourses? You would still exhaust regenerative/reparative capacities, accumulate chemical byproducts and waste - shift balances. See nitrification of water bodies.
The core problem is our lazyness to recapture uncompressed former dense resources; to operate closed cycle.
And well, I have my doubts we can establish the extend of space exploitation to meet our current e.g. global phosphorus needs within the next 30 years. Is phosphate rock even plenty around in asteroids?
The Nature article has some normal stress/strain curves which show brittle failure https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476/figures/6
Not clear what's special about their compression step.
With enough heat and pressure, does this new material avoid that problem? Or is it a "do not get wet" product.
"Cellulose, the main component of wood, has a higher ratio of strength to density than most engineered materials, like ceramics, metals, and polymers, but our existing usage of wood barely touches its full potential."
It's just a beginning, but a good one. Hard to see HW replacing the myriad things we use steel or ceramics for, but intriguing.
I'm not willing to pay for the article to read it, but it seems like this is pretty different from epoxy stabilized wood (which isn't particularly hard).