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

[Judi Lynn]

And it can stop bullets, too.

DAVID NIELD 9 FEB 2018
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.

Key to the new wood's superpowers is a special chemical treatment followed by a heated compression process. The resulting chemical bonds make the wood strong enough to one day be used in buildings and vehicles.

It could even take a turn in new armour plating – 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, as they did with standard-strength wood.

"This new way to treat wood makes it 12 times stronger than natural wood and 10 times tougher," says senior researcher Liangbing Hu, from the University of Maryland.

More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/new-super-wood-stronger-than-steel

[BootinUp]

1. -1 wheres the real info on relative cost etc.

[Binkie The Clown]

2. Wooden Vehicles? Who'd a thunk it?

[eppur_se_muova]

3. .

[byronius]

4. Ah, the beauty of that design.

Thank god Hitler was so stupid about certain things. Like Trump.

This and the Jagdpanther could have had us all speaking German.

But no.

[SCantiGOP]

25. And if WW2 had lasted several months longer Hitler would have had the bomb...

...dropped on him.

To be serious, had he not run all of the Jewish scientists off and they had worked for the Reich there is no way we would have developed the A Bomb before them.

[byronius]

28. All the little things that save us - because authoritarianism and hatred are rife with incompetence.

It's just an axiomatic truth. Definite evolutionary advantages to democracy and interdependent respect and a non-caste-based social structure. Kindness is seen as weakness to conservatives, but it wins every time, just like Gandhi said.

So far. We should all cross our fingers.

[marylandblue]

29. I wish that were true,

But history has many examples of democracies and republics failing and losing out to tyrannies.

[byronius]

30. Ah, but the vector goes up.

Draw a line from three thousand years ago and it goes steadily up in terms of human freedoms and quality of life. Ups and downs that represent lifetimes of misery, yes, but always up.

Strong-man tribalism has always existed, three million years of that crap. Democracy is new, but it's more efficient as a social organizational mode -- societies that sustain democracies are far more productive and successful.

[Binkie The Clown]

35. "Weather" vs. "Climate"

The climate is becoming more democratic even when the day-to-day weather masks that long-term trend.

[lapfog_1]

31. and this

[Igel]

34. Right?

And the shear novelty of using wood in buildings.

We're deep into musk territory.

Not Elon.

Ox.

[byronius]

5. My only problem with this is that I'm a tree-hugger. I'd rather not ever kill trees, period.

Perhaps vat-grown wood would be okay. But some sort of sintered garbage/plastic would be better.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

9. renewable

Trees just need space to grow. We still have lots of them in the wild and in plantations.

Let's rip up the stupid parking lots and plant urban trees. Stack parking spaces vertically -- above and below ground. Look at aerial views of any sports stadium, mall or race track. Acres of asphalt and concrete that could be grass, trees and flowers for people.

[byronius]

13. Yeah, but life-form.

I've gotten to that point in my life where I don't want to kill anything at all.

Vegan. It happens to you when you go vegan. I kill life forms everyday, but try not to.

I agree about returning the Earth to park-like status ASAP. That would be nice.

[Binkie The Clown]

36. As a vegan, I don't feel too bad about killing carrots and potatoes.

And I have no problem at all with cutting down crop-grown trees that are immediately replaced with the next crop.
There's a significant difference between harvesting a crop and raping wild nature.

[byronius]

37. I've just started to look at things differently over time.

Carrots and potatoes are essentially energy pods for seeds, like beans, short-lived. Trees are incredibly long-living organisms that communicate with each other. Perhaps that seems a small difference.

Over the last few years I've been pondering the unspoken assumption most people make that all other life forms are to be viewed purely through the lens of usefulness. We conquer and shape all other life forms to our needs -- it's just evolution, it's what we do to make the leap to survival and success as a life form.

I suppose I'd like to get to the point where that assumption is thought about, considered and tested from a point of view less purely anthropocentric. I would view refraining from the automatic enslavement of other life forms as an expression of strength, of advancement, of ascendance beyond the standard primal rhythms.

I'm just pondering it. But certain themes emerge quickly -- factory farming of animals that possess some continuum of consciousness and who form families and can problem-solve is probably on the high end of Let's Not Do That If We Don't Absolutely Have To.

Yes, I'm a vegan too. The philosophy involved is beginning to be supported by serious science, and it just seems clear to me that there is wisdom to be found in thinking deeply about this stuff.

You know, the concept of not automatically enslaving other humans for labor and sex is relatively new on the scale of history, and its rejection still lingers in certain cultures. It was always considered a radical and pathologically weak idea to refrain from dominating and consuming the fruits of others, an assumption that this was normal human activity, and always for the Good.

Now the opposite is law. Sort of. Most places. And I just tend to include trees in my circle. Rather leave them be, and not bend them to my will for profit. If there's another way, I'll take it.

[quickesst]

6. Hemp: " I could'a been a contender" 10 times stronger than steel.

Talking about Henry Ford

"To think that even one of the founders of a major car manufacturer was trying to give the world a vehicle that was safe, strong and clean for the environment, yet his invention was so suppressed that it is somewhat disheartening. How did we go from such an obvious and intelligent discovery, to using gasoline, steel and other non-harmonious materials? It’s important to remember, not only do we need to look at the pollution factor of a material while in use, but also in the manufacturing and creation of it from raw materials. Looking at hemp, it complies with every eco-standard that exists today; in fact, it blows them out of the water. The suppression of this technology is largely due to the fact that hemp was outlawed in the US in 1937 due to the potential damaging effect it would have on many powerful industries at the time. I highly recommend you check out the the full story on how hemp became illegal to get a better understanding."



http://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/02/25/henry-ford-hemp-plastic-car-stronger/

[silverweb]

12. Indeed.

How different things could have been.

[quickesst]

17. Yep

Food, the Auto industry, textiles, clothes, and the list goes on. Steam's me every time I think about it, and I've been thinking about it for 50 years.

[eppur_se_muova]

15. It should work with hemp as well, I would think ...

basically, the process removes most of the air spaces (which are filled with fluid in the growing wood) and compresses the remaining cellulose fibers together. Presumably, it removes most of the lignin which originally bound the fibers, but perhaps leaves enough to re-bind them. The chemical process is basically the same as used to make paper, and since hemp can be converted to paper by a similar process, I would think processing hemp in the same, or a ver similar way, would give a promising material as well. Given that hemp grows much faster than trees, I think that might be the better, more easily renewable, approach.

[C Moon]

7. I didn't read the article, but I'm guessing it would be lighter, too?

[Midnight Writer]

8. Does this lead into a Viagra ad?

[silverweb]

10. And how toxic are the chemicals used to effect this transformation?

What good is bulletproof wood if making it just dumps more poisons into our environment?

I might consider this good news if and when someone guarantees that (a) the wood is sustainably harvested from designated sites, and (b) the chemicals used to treat it are no more toxic than baking soda or vinegar.

[The Polack MSgt]

14. "boiled in a mix of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulphite"

Sodium Hydroxide - "As one of the most simple hydroxides, it is frequently utilised alongside neutral water and acidic hydrochloric acid to demonstrate the pH scale to chemistry students." - Wikipedia.
It's already used in dozens of applications, and while it's a very caustic alkali, it's so reactive that it is not a long term problem if spilled...

Sodium Sulphite - "is a product of sulfur dioxide scrubbing, a part of the flue-gas desulfurization process. It is also used as a preservative to prevent dried fruit from discoloring, and for preserving meats, and is used in the same way as sodium thiosulfate to convert elemental halogens to their respective hydrohalic acids, in photography and for reducing chlorine levels in pools." - Wikipedia

So I wouldn't want to drink either, neither is a long term pollution issue as they will break down into inert chemicals in pretty short order. We aren't talking about some esoteric long chain polymers or super solvents...

[silverweb]

19. Good to know.

Thank you for the breakdown.

[eppur_se_muova]

18. It would probably be similar to making paper in that regard.

Here in AL, we well know what paper mills smell like from miles away. And they can produce huge volumes of liquid effluent. Fortunately, a considerable effort has been devoted to making the process cleaner; it's mostly a matter of enforcing regulations, not developing new technology.

But you're right, everything comes at a cost.

Here's what steelmaking used to do for us in AL:

[silverweb]

20. Sometimes the cost is far too high.

The current gutting of the EPA and rollback of many environmental regulations could have us looking like that smoggy mess again in no time.

[eppur_se_muova]

21. The cost of electing 45 is well summed up in NNadir's sig line --

"Elect a Clown; Expect a Circus."

[silverweb]

22. Definitely!

It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry at some of the circus acts we've been seeing.

[Igel]

33. Ah. Looks like home used to look.

Grew up near the Beth Steel plant in Sparrows Point. If the person's a relative of mine or of a friend of mine in high school, that was their job. To get to many places we'd have to go by or through the mill.

Yes, it looks polluting, and was. Some of the pollution was my play stuff. The sheer amount of iron deposits in the dust and dirt on the street taught me about magnets and kept me amused for hours.

The sulfur and nitrogen emissions ... Not so good. Of course, vegetable gardening really required a bit of slaked lime. Between the rain and the iron, the soil tended to be a bit too acidic for some plants.

But once the company was going to develop some of the many scores of acres of "empty," forested land and planned on trains on trestles. So there was this huge strip of crushed slag from the blast furnaces that they dumped. It went for over a mile, maybe 80 feet high and 30 feet wide up at the top. Between that and the forest, it was fun to be a kid in the area.

[CaptainTruth]

11. Sounds like an advancement on glulam (glued laminated).

I once did a remodel where I lifted the roof off the back of a house, removed the exterior wall, & rebuilt it with a row of 6 French doors, with a 20 foot glulam header over the 18 foot span of doors (there were load-bearing posts between the doors, so it wasn't a clear span).

At that time my understanding was that pound-for-pound the glulam header was stronger than a steel beam.

[eppur_se_muova]

16. That's a pretty good way of thinking of it. Apparently some of the wood's natural lignin is saved ..

... and after compression binds the wood fibers back together.

I say apparently, because I don't know the details of the process, but from what description there is, I think that's it.

[Canoe52]

24. Pound to pound wood is as strong as steel.

Glulam works like plywood, glued together pieces of wood uses grain direction to make it stiffer and stronger than the original wood and pound for pound stronger than an equally weight of steel.
Of course with steel you use shape to maximum its strength to weight ratio also, The I-beam is stronger than a solid piece of steel using the same volume of steel.

[Sneederbunk]

26. A steel woody could be dangerous.

[Lint Head]

27. That's great but one thing. If you strike a match to it does it burn?

Having car is driving down the road are planes flying in flames would not be a pretty sight to see.