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Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic

315 points2 yearscell.com
sfink2 years ago

I've been intrigued for a while about various modified wood technologies (eg hardened wood, transparent wood), but I'm always disappointed because it usually ends up just being a minor support structure for a very non-wood material (generally epoxy). This one shows a compression step, so maybe it's different, but I'd really like more info on whether this is actually renewable or sustainable in any interesting sense.

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.

jonpurdy2 years ago

Curious about your opinion on bamboo products. I assume you're referring to modern bamboo desks, shelves, and other items that are made from Chinese bamboo and made in China. They typically slice the bamboo grass pieces into ~8 sections, then use planing machines to create planks※. These are then pressed and glued together to make products. These products are then shipped overseas using the same methods as other products.

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.

blacksmith_tb2 years ago

Some good photos of the process here[1]. The figure that's generally quoted for the time it takes for a mature timber bamboo culm to grow from a shoot to ~20m to be harvested is 3-5yr. Obviously each one is small compared to a large tree, but a stand of bamboo can produce a lot.

1; https://www.bambooimport.com/en/how-is-bamboo-lumber-made

bartvk2 years ago

That's an amazing link, with unadorned and unpolished shots of the factory where the bamboo lumber is made. Very interesting.

svachalek2 years ago

The usual complaint I see against bamboo products is that they use hard bamboo that grows like trees, but promote a sustainable image based on the idea of soft bamboo that grows like grass. I haven't heard it's less sustainable than wood, just not any more sustainable.

wrycoder2 years ago

Kg of wood per hectare-yr would be a good measure of how much useful wood is created, and also how much carbon is locked up in it.

+2
chrisweekly2 years ago
adolph2 years ago

Well, the glue is a renewable resource, old livestock and milk. That's why Borden used mascot Elsie's spouse Elmer as a glue mascot.

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

https://americacomesalive.com/elmers-glue-the-surprising-sto...

jml7c52 years ago

I'd be very surprised if animal glue was used in any engineered wood. Even in fine woodworking it's a niche product; it's expensive and generally doesn't work as well as other glues.

drjasonharrison2 years ago

On the other hand, it is reversible. https://woodworkingparts.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/hide-glue-...

"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."

rahimnathwani2 years ago

What % of engineered bamboo flooring is stuff other than bamboo (like glue)? From looking at the side when installing it, it seemed like very little.

brodouevencode2 years ago

Quite a bit actually. Bamboo cant be cut into planks, so it's typically ripped into really thin strips and then laminated.

andreareina2 years ago

Even then it's little enough that I haven't been able to discern the glue even after close inspection.

agumonkey2 years ago

I, too, would like to see "green" engineering. How to nicely tap in biosphere / organic material to make whatever we need.

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.

throwaway9465132 years ago

The Trabant - a classic example of cheap East German engineering. Woefully crash 'un'resistant, and a body made of cotton.

Guy in my state on YouTube has one and takes it to car shows, or used to. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhpIgM6TpwA)

hulitu2 years ago

They even made a film with this car. It's called: Up in Smoke.

osense2 years ago

As an aside, the article mentions:

> 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)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_oil#Food_preparation

NoSorryCannot2 years ago

Mineral oil can be found in most pharmacies marketed as a laxative. It's a common oil to use for cutting boards and other applications in proximity to food.

hilbert422 years ago

Right, another instance of where the mineral product is to be much preferred over the so-called natural one is with turpentine.

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.

hilbert422 years ago

It depends on what you mean by mineral oil. Without definition it's about as useless as saying I've painted something in 'color' rather than specifying what color one used.

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.

scythe2 years ago

Since the article talks a lot about replacing small plastic utensils, it seems plausible that they're not targeting structural applications at the moment, so the point about glue could be moot.

But will we see a wooden laptop?

MisterBastahrd2 years ago

Reminds me of the one video I saw of this man spraying different things with some sort of polymer that was virtually unbreakable. He'd spray a cinderblock wall and then hit it with a sledgehammer. The wall would break, but the polymer would hold... so yay?

That said, It seems like the sort of thing you'd want to spray asphalt shingles with.

carlhjerpe2 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWkYRh6OXy8

Remember that everything that's always outside will be subjet to death by the sun.

jsilence2 years ago

Rhino shield probably

wffurr2 years ago

Well it didn’t involve any epoxy, just a chemical bath in readily available chemicals and a pressure step. The energy requirements seem significantly lower than steel processing.

tjmc2 years ago

Mechanical engineer here. This article is very light on a lot of detail which would allow you to reasonably compare this material to steel, plastic or any other material. Just a few that come to mind:

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?

sixstringtheory2 years ago

I’d been interested to know your thoughts on pykrete! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete

tjmc2 years ago

"Plausible, but ludicrous"

canadian_tired2 years ago

Wood is renewable when you can grow it, cut it up into useful shapes, then at the end of its useful life, compost it. As soon as you add a shit load of processing and plastic and other stuff it's not "wood" anymore than gasoline is a dead dinosaur. As for things like plywood that use glue for the laminations...glue is the most expensive and important part of the product. Not the wood so much. Replacing steel? I don't think so. Yes, steel is a dirty thing ecologically... but steel things last a long time... and require, in general minimal processing...unlike this hardened wood proposal. If steel showed up today as a new material, it would be lauded for all its technical properties. But it is now old and not so sexy.

entropicgravity2 years ago

In addition progress making steel with a lot less CO2, by using hydrogen (and other techniques) instead of coal has come a long way. This isn't just pie in the sky, the world's second largest steel maker plans to reduce CO2 by 30% before 2030. [1] And of course steel is eminently recyclable. I'm not against wood but steel has some good long term attributes as well.

[1]https://corporate.arcelormittal.com/sustainability/climate-a...

huntertwo2 years ago

How do they make hydrogen clean? 95% of hydrogen comes from burning fossil fuels. I doubt they're going through electrolysis to make the hydrogen or sourcing it from a supplier that does.

ehnto2 years ago

It's part of the ongoing process, we can't skip to the final step. I think it is fair to rely on electricity and assume it will at least one day be green when thinking about green processes in totality, since some places are already generating green electricity. In my city we have a hydrogen plant powered mostly y solar that is feeding the steel mill, and this is just the beginning of exploring this process so it is bound to get more efficient.

tiluha2 years ago

The variable nature of most renewable energy sources might make hydrogen produced by electrolysis cheap enough

gonzo412 years ago

You can also coke iron with carbon from plastic. It's still not super great. But it does reuse plastics which don't get recycled enough.

XorNot2 years ago

Reusing plastics is honestly one of those "do we need to" things these days. The theory is that if we reuse them, then the waste doesn't pollute the environment - but landfilled plastic waste is basically sequestered carbon, and plastic pollution is ocean-borne and mostly being directly produced by poor environmental practice - not unrecycled plastic waste or landfill escape.

gonzo412 years ago

Yeah I agree, I'm pretty pro, bury plastic in the ground, but I figure if we need to coke steel rather than digging up coal we can just divert a few trucks.

+1
gremloni2 years ago
contravariant2 years ago

I suppose it solves littering but in the end you're still just burning plastics and turning them into CO2, which isn't great.

danuker2 years ago

Reminds me of "Plasteel" from RimWorld.

boplicity2 years ago

Steel production is one of the largest contributors to global C02 emissions. Reducing it by 30% isn't a solution. Unfortunately, zero-carbon-emissions steel is still not feasibile, which is a major, major issue for the health of our planet.

elzbardico2 years ago

We have to start somewhere don’t we?

boplicity2 years ago

Yes -- but it's not a start unless we're making zero-emissions steel possible. Otherwise, it's just more of the same. (Akin to stabbing someone with a 30% smaller knife.)

gilbetron2 years ago

A benefit of using wood is not composting it in the end. We want to pull carbon out of the air, which trees are good at, but we don't want to let it back into the air when it is done. Adding all the stuff to it increases the longevity, which is helpful.

Steel doesn't pull carbon out of the air, unfortunately.

munk-a2 years ago

If half of the material ending up as "wood" in a building is epoxy or some other treatment, though, the efficacy of using buildings for carbon capture seems quite decreased.

fy202 years ago

Well epoxy is basically just lots of hydrogen and carbon with a few other elements - it could work quite well as a carbon sink too.

The raw materials to manufacture it are mostly hydrocarbons. Maybe we should be focusing on making "green epoxy" instead.

gilbetron2 years ago

Not if there is more than a doubling in use of wood. The epoxy, or whatever, makes wood a more compelling construction material, and if it results in far more wood construction, it is a net win.

KorematsuFredt2 years ago

Why are people not considering just growing large trees to capture carbon cut down those trees and just coat them in plastic and throw them at the bottom of ocean/desert or some kind of storage where this carbon can stay trapped for thousands of years ? What am I missing ?

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.

danuker2 years ago

Because 20 million trees planted would offset US emissions by 2 days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqht2bIQXIY

whiddershins2 years ago

But I can’t tell if 20 million trees is a lot or a little.

+1
contravariant2 years ago
runarberg2 years ago

I did some quick googling and the first figure I found was that Americans plant around 1.6 billion trees every year. That is around 4.4 million every day, almost half of what is required for the carbon offset claims by GP.

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...

CodeGlitch2 years ago

I wonder if there's any legs in algae or seaweed. Wouldn't take up valuable land to grow and is fast growing.

+1
gbrown2 years ago
Igelau2 years ago

I'll never understand why it's always "stop climate change" or "deny climate change" but there's essentially no room for "fix climate change" or "reverse climate change". The resources are allocated for polarization and not pragmatism.

nl2 years ago

Carbon capture using trees is very common. Most carbin offset programs fund this.

No need to drop it to the bottom of the ocean though. Just build something out of it.

Calloutman2 years ago

Maybe because trees contain a lot of water/nutrients? Tbh I've always wondered what you've said too, though I'd just dump the wood in old mines etc.

Ma8ee2 years ago

Or build houses and bridges and stuff with them instead of concrete.

bumby2 years ago

The US can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance as it is, let alone moving to materials with shorter lifespans and more maintenance

+1
Ma8ee2 years ago
carlisle_2 years ago

There’s something to be said for the fact that harvesting wood is much more environmentally friendly than petroleum. At the very least a “wood spill” doesn’t exist as far as I know.

AdamN2 years ago

Petroleum is definitely more environmentally friendly than the timber industry. You probably haven't driven around tree farms - monoculture that destroys the environment for hundreds of square miles. Even worse is when they pulp existing forest for things like toilet paper:

https://www.rcinet.ca/en/2019/02/26/u-s-use-of-toilet-paper-...

KennyBlanken2 years ago

That's an article about toilet paper usage, not building material. There's no petroleum toilet paper, by the way.

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.

+2
megameter2 years ago
agumonkey2 years ago

Few things, maybe the way to farm trees is naive and can be done in better ways. Just entice companies to have different ways of working (even if they raise the price a little afterwards)

Also petroleum being a big factor in CO2 levels it's hard to not put it first isn't it ?

whiddershins2 years ago

A side benefit of burning the petroleum is trees do grow much faster and bigger.

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.

quixoticelixer-2 years ago

lmao

ip262 years ago

Steel is amazing - and as a result we use it in all kinds of places where its properties aren't fully utilized.

Aluminum has been growing into that role of "steel alternative", but there's still room for other alternatives.

aurizon2 years ago

Looking back at Aluminium, it was once very costly - there was no economical way to extract it from clay by traditional metallurgy. When the Hall process of electrolytic extraction from molten salts was invented = huge price decline, and useage. Titanium is in a similar position, fairly common, but hard to extract economically. I hope there is a low cost electrolytic to recover Titanium found some day, as it is a very good material for all manner of uses at a lower price. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall%E2%80%93H%C3%A9roult_proc...

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

zardo2 years ago

>Looking back at Aluminium, it was once very costly - there was no economical way to extract it from clay by traditional metallurgy.

Supposedly Napoleon III had aluminum tableware for his most honored guests, and gold for everyone else.

aurizon2 years ago

Yes, It was very hard to liberate Aluminum from oxygen with his level of chemistry...

pitaj2 years ago

Titanium is extremely difficult to machine, which is part of why titanium parts (like those used in airplanes) are so expensive.

jjtheblunt2 years ago

you just reminded me of the marvelous magnesium NeXT cases, before Apple's alumin[i]um became popular.

xxs2 years ago

magnesium is sort of a more expensive version of al.

+6
gnabgib2 years ago
TaylorAlexander2 years ago

Yep I was really pleased to see that ikea has started offering cheap galvanized steel shelves (named “Hyllis”). Glad to have something fully recyclable.

Consultant324522 years ago
skohan2 years ago

> As for things like plywood that use glue for the laminations...glue is the most expensive and important part of the product

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?

ummonk2 years ago

I think you just reinvented fiberglass and carbon fiber

skohan2 years ago

Oh that's true! Is carbon fiber bonded by glue?

fasterbynight2 years ago

It's bonded by epoxy just like plywood is. Technically plywood is a composite (at least from a mechanical engineering perspective).

wffurr2 years ago

Exactly which step of this hardened wood process uses glue? I didn’t see that anywhere in the paper.

adrian_b2 years ago

I have not seen the paper, but the process almost certainly does not use any glue.

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.

nl2 years ago

This process doesn't use glue. It relies on compressing wood and removal of ligand.

hilbert422 years ago

"But it is now old and not so sexy."

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.

EGreg2 years ago

Not to mention all that carbon released when the wood decomposes - no ?

mikeg82 years ago

No expert here but I believe it depends on how it decomposes. If wood rots at the surface, my understanding is more carbon is released into the atmosphere but if it is buried or decomposed using fungi or soil microbes, more carbon is captured into the soil.

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...

spfzero2 years ago

That's the reason you use wood chips and bark for mulch in a garden; to add carbon to the soil.

psd12 years ago

It isn't the usual primary reason. You use these things to provide a mulch layer over the top of tilth; it suppresses weed germination.

If all you want is to add organics, you'd probably fork in manure.

canadianfella2 years ago

Do you have a source for that? That sounds wrong.

noselasd2 years ago

It was captured from the air when the wood was grown though - so as long as you maintain the forrest you took the wood from it works out.

mensetmanusman2 years ago

No, not all carbon is released as gas during decomposition. If it were, we wouldn’t have diamonds :)

burnished2 years ago

I don't know enough about diamond formation to properly dispute this, but I thought they didn't form from organic, locally sourced carbon?

ajnin2 years ago

Yes, that's why planting trees to offset carbon emissions is not really as good an idea as it seems, trees can live a long time but they're not immortal, and when they die they release their carbon back into the environment.

pxndx2 years ago

If you turn what now is barren land or grasslands into a forest, it absorbs CO2 as it grows, and that CO2 stays captured for as long as that land is a forest, it doesn't matter if individual trees die and decompose.

robotresearcher2 years ago

If you leave them alone to make baby trees, they can be an amortized constant capture or better.

Meanwhile they liberate oxygen, which I enjoy daily.

booi2 years ago

By released I assume you mean into the air? I think only if it's burned?

lindseymysse2 years ago

You can make steel with charcoal, which is carbon neutral in the end: https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation...

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?

i_am_proteus2 years ago

Making steel is how we got here. Europe was decimating her forests for charcoal. England ran out first, then turned to coal, then needed to pump water out of coal mines...

lindseymysse2 years ago

Thanks for that history. Alas, no such thing as a free lunch.

i_am_proteus2 years ago

Lunch has never been free.

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.

8note2 years ago

It has a carbon neutral implementation (grow trees, the burn them) but it also has a carbon positive alternative which I much cheaper (cut down existing forests an go out of business once there's no forests)

Wood chip heating already has that problem

tuatoru2 years ago

> You can make steel with charcoal

Not at the scale at which the world needs steel.

fy202 years ago

How is Plywood and OSB recycled (for the municipalities that do so)? Wouldn't the different types of glue (from different manufacturers or grades) cause problems there? Or is it just used as an industrial fuel where the glue is burned off?

soperj2 years ago

It doesn't last so long in construction, rebar in concrete has like a 75 year lifespan no?

tedivm2 years ago

> In reality, their life span is more like 50-100 years, and sometimes less. Building codes and policies generally require buildings to survive for several decades, but deterioration can begin in as little as 10 years.

zardo2 years ago

Plus or minus 25 years depending on the environment and maintenance. But I would disagree that 75 years is not so long.

katbyte2 years ago

Does that not depend if it’s stainless or not?

zardo2 years ago

I think that's only used for structures immersed in seawater.

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.

meltedcapacitor2 years ago

Stainless steel rebar is also used for (not only seaside) bridges etc, but at 10x the cost it's not going to be in ordinary buildings.

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.

noja2 years ago
FpUser2 years ago

>"As soon as you add a shit load of processing and plastic and other stuff it's not "wood" anymore than gasoline is a dead dinosaur.

This is priceless. love it.

spfzero2 years ago

At least this material has a main ingredient that is renewable. No part of steel is renewable right? You can't grow more iron ore (though there is a lot of it lying around).

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?

xxs2 years ago

>You can't grow more iron ore

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...

mywittyname2 years ago

Wood also requires heavy equipment to cut, mill, process. Not to mention, it needs a heck of a lot of land area. In addition to whatever process is involved in "hardening" this wood.

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.

djrogers2 years ago

The big advantage to wood though, is that while it's growing it's a carbon sink, and once hardened that carbon is likely stored forever.

korantu2 years ago

you can achieve the same effect by making plastic with captured co2 [1]. Carbon would stay in plastic for very long time.

This way you get to reuse all the (enormous) existing infrastructure, as well.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9717/9/5/759/pdf

patmorgan232 years ago

Steel can be recycled/reused pretty easily. Just melt it down on an arc furnace and recast it. Can the same be said for hardened wood?

AlexandrB2 years ago

Indeed, steel is so recyclable that people will pay you for it regardless of condition. Contrast that to any kind of wood/pulp product.

WalterBright2 years ago

> You can't grow more iron ore (though there is a lot of it lying around).

We live on a thin crusty shell around a ball of iron.

adrian_b2 years ago

The ball of iron would be Earth's core, and between the thin crust on which we live and the iron core there is the very thick mantle.

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.

_nalply2 years ago

> ball of iron

... which is way beyond our reach.

8note2 years ago

The iron in the universe is increasing over time.

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

debacle2 years ago

Considering that the graphic references basswood, my guess is that the primary component of the final product, by mass, is not wood.

westurner2 years ago

From "Hemp Wood: A Comprehensive Guide" https://www.buildwithrise.com/stories/hempwood-the-sustainab... :

> 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.

https://hempwood.com/

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.

ksec2 years ago

FWIU = From What I Understand

quixoticelixer-2 years ago

Why not just use wood?

kfprt2 years ago

I want to like hempwood but the price needs to come down. Hopefully it will as production increases.

westurner2 years ago

What are the limits? Input costs, current economy of scale?

kfprt2 years ago
westurner2 years ago

What an excellent video overview!

That does look like there's still a lot of manual labor in the depicted production process... Automation and clean energy.

oliwarner2 years ago

The graph in that composite diagram is really bothering me.

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.

beambot2 years ago

Species matters, but so does availability. Lignum vitae is an endangered species, so it's not really a renewable alternative at the scale humanity requires.

icedistilled2 years ago

fun fact, you can grow Lignum Vitae in SoCal in certain areas, not just in Florida. San Diego would probably grow lignum vitae well because it seems to like the random humid weeks in Los Angeles and just exists for the rest of the year

carapace2 years ago

Do you know anyone who has Lignum Vitae seeds or seedlings for sale or trade?

icedistilled2 years ago

About a decade ago I ordered some from a nursery in florida, in retrospect I'm not sure that's an ideal thing to do. But I think I did order directly form the nursery so hopefully they were following the regulations, whereas amazon will freely help third parties sell completely illicit plant materials that could bring pests.

meepmorp2 years ago

I think the point of using basswood as a reference is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the hardening process by using a very soft wood. Separately, basswood is fairly quick growing, making it a decent candidate for commercialization of the whole technology.

fhood2 years ago

Not really "separately", pretty much as a rule hardwoods grow very slowly. Pretty much any fast growing wood is going to be soft.

meepmorp2 years ago

Basswood is a hardwood because it's a flowering tree (angiosperm); softwoods come from conifers (gymnosperms).

Balsa is a hardwood, too.

dreamlayers2 years ago

It is possible to make a knife out of lignum vitae: https://www.solidsmack.com/fabrication/lignum-vitae-ironwood...

So I guess the achievement here is that commonly available inexpensive wood can be made as hard as rare expensive wood.

oliwarner2 years ago

It's not cheap though, all the bloody carvers get it. Not that any wood is cheap at the moment.

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.

tgtweak2 years ago

That was my first thought too - maybe basswood is cheating. It does look though after some research that it seems that the process can be applied to other woods as well, since the process consists essentially of removing the non-cellulose component of the wood (hemicellulose and lignin) with heated chemical solution, then heat-pressing the resulting cellulose-only matter into hard block material.

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...

ksec2 years ago

For people who are interested in Timber Building / Construction.

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

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8LlcuV0gc

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieBVNgMkcpw

sixstringtheory2 years ago

To add more huge timber structures to the list, here’s a starting point to see/learn more about the historical Kennecott mine in Wrangell-St. Elias Nat’l park in Alaska [0]. I’ve had the good fortune to walk through it–it is simply incredible.

[0]: https://www.nps.gov/wrst/learn/historyculture/kennecott-mine...

turtlebits2 years ago

All of these sound good, but the caveat is that they are wood + epoxy/resin/glue.

frosted-flakes2 years ago

Why is that a caveat?

sp3322 years ago

The knife in the article is just wood, with some food-grade oil on the surface.

nico_h2 years ago

Can't read the article. How energy efficient and environmentally friendly is the hardening process compared to making steel? And is it a "in 20 years" thing again, like all new battery tech?

joshvm2 years ago

Steel is incredibly energy intensive. It's not unusual for casting plants to have their own dedicated power stations. Traditionally you'd use coke to melt things (well, smelt iron ore), nowadays with induction/arc furnaces you can in theory use green energy, but it's still a huge amount of power.

martythemaniak2 years ago

A general note: in a world of super cheap solar or wind, energy efficiency doesn't matter as much. It's cheap because In many instances, the end product is the "battery".

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.

zdragnar2 years ago

This kind of thinking is why cryptocurrency miners are setting up shop at substations. They get severely discounted electricity from the utilities, in exchange for ramping up and down their servers to keep the grid load balanced.

Except, of course, cryptocurrency isn't nearly as useful as, say, desalinated water.

vkou2 years ago

> 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....

zdragnar2 years ago

That's why they are pursuing deals with electric companies. In exchange for helping with loaf balancing, they get electricity well below market rates. They are making a killing.

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.

orasis2 years ago

“Except, of course, cryptocurrency isn't nearly as useful as, say, desalinated water.”

Heresy!!

gnramires2 years ago

That's a common misconception; energy will matter anyhow.

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.

ahevia2 years ago

The summary states the process of making hardened wood is more energy efficient, but I also wonder how long this would take to scale. Seems great for small operations (like the bench at a local park), but might require regulatory changes to use in any large projects.

jillesvangurp2 years ago

Not sure if this is exactly the same but cross laminated timber (CLT) is already being used for constructing all kinds of buildings.

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.

toast02 years ago

> - 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.

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'.

pwr-electronics2 years ago

HW is something you can do to one piece of wood, while CLT is something you can do to combine multiple pieces of wood. So you could have a HW CLT, for example.

KennyBlanken2 years ago

The biggest problem with CLT and other engineered wood beams is that it fails extremely quickly in a fire.

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.

gamblor9562 years ago
+1
KennyBlanken2 years ago
jillesvangurp2 years ago

It's not that black and white. CLT is more of a group of materials with different characteristics than a single thing. Fire rated versions of it exist and are commonly used depending on the requirements and building codes. This article has a nice overview: https://constructionexec.com/article/fire-safety-of-clt-and-...

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.

ethbr02 years ago

A blocker to deployment would be getting building codes updated to permit use. From memory, wood was only approved for 3 story or less structures in most of the US. And building codes tend to be updated extremely slowly and conservatively.

the_other2 years ago

When Greta talks to the public sphere about government failing its climate responsibility, this is the kind of stuff she’s talking about.

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.

+2
spfzero2 years ago
jillesvangurp2 years ago

Bureaucracy like that is always a short term obstacle. US building codes are not much of a quality or technical challenge though if you consider that Tokyo has typhoons and earthquakes and is planning a 350m skyscraper with CLT. I'd say anything suitable for that, ought to be acceptable for construction in most of the US.

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.

clairity2 years ago

from what i remember, it’s up to 6 stories in some parts of the country. i think it’s other aspects of the zoning and/or building code that tends to limit it to 3 stories—often podium style, with a concrete bunker foundation for cars with 3 stick-built stories on top.

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.

+1
shawn-butler2 years ago
jessaustin2 years ago

Lake of the Ozarks was in the news last year for our aggressive disdain for covid precautions. The shoreline is occupied by many 4-, 5-, and 6-story stick-built condominium buildings. I've never heard of one falling over, but sometimes they do burn...

finder832 years ago

Looks like giant plywood. I'm actually really curious how it handles moisture content changes. Does it crack and is it dimensionally as stable as plywood?

jillesvangurp2 years ago

Well, the short answer is that it is being used in Tokyo to build a sky scraper that is 350m high. You would not do that with plywood. Also, Tokyo has earth quakes, high humidity and typhoons. So, apparently it's up to that job and if it can work there, it can work pretty much anywhere.

clairity2 years ago

also, CLT can be combined with steel to create stronger load-bearing members, while also being more aesthetically pleasing, effectively replacing concrete for class A construction of tall buildings.

hammock2 years ago

Here is a non-paywalled description of the process. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a167588...

>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.

panzagl2 years ago

Are the long term effects any less detrimental than other polymerized materials, or is this basically another way to make plastic?

mjh25392 years ago

We have, for all intents and purposes, an unlimited supply of carbon and iron. Assuming we one day get over our FUD of nuclear energy (which with the use of breeder reactors is considered a renewable form of energy), it follows that steel itself can be considered renewable.

korantu2 years ago

And even co2-negative, if made with captured co2

catskul22 years ago

Can we all stop for a second and appreciate the "Graphical Abstract"? IMO it's great, and every paper that where such a thing is reasonable should have one!

erpellan2 years ago

There's also Accoya acetylated wood, which is already commercialized: https://www.accoya.com

anon_cow11112 years ago

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01600-6

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)

jcrawfordor2 years ago

Permali is a commercially available hardened wood with impressive properties, but it's based on impregnation with a resin which is not the most environmentally friendly process. A particularly interesting application of Permali is the nuts and bolts fastening the ATLAS-I Trestle (said to be the largest wooden structure in the world) together, since the nature of the facility required use of a dialectric material for the large fasteners.

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.

symby2 years ago

I'm sold. Where can I get some of this hardened wood? I would like to experiment with it and maybe incorporate it into products.

anon_cow11112 years ago

I have a tiny bit of advice I might be able to lend here, for experimentation purposes mainly. Regular hardwood can be heat-treated to increase its density and compression strength considerably, in the most basic form this can be done at home by heating it... slowly... up to ~400F (typically just holding it over a hot-plate until it's light-medium brown. You'll want a temperature-stable oven for wood more than a cm or so thick)

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.

symby2 years ago

Yeah... I don't want to make this stuff, I want to use this stuff.

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.

anon_cow11112 years ago

My best guess would be to contact someone from the study group directly via email and ask about obtaining an engineering sample for a potential commercial product (no really, they'll probably appreciate it). At this point the wood is likely still being produced in situ (i.e. a few guys making it in a phys/chem lab). The more interest is shown to them, the more likely they are to start looking at contracting the process out, thus making material easier to obtain and lower cost.

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.

fredley2 years ago

It's tough to get, it doesn't just grow on trees.

tromp2 years ago

I'd love some hardwood cutlery. Assuming it's soak-proof, as I often leave dirty kitchenware to soak before washing it.

anon_cow11112 years ago

I'll give you a more specific reply along with the parent poster while I'm at it... You definitely can cut meat etc, with densified wood, just don't expect it to hold an edge like your steel cutlery, especially if you're using with something besides a soft cutting board. The article mentions oil-treatment so it probably won't absorb water in normal kitchen use.

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.

opwieurposiu2 years ago

Most of the sources for this stuff I have found sell it as deck boards.

https://store.us.kebony.com/pages/samples

rtkaratekid2 years ago

I’m also interested in this

ostenning2 years ago

Whenever I hear about renewable trees I cant help but think how policy failures often lead to more and more forests being destroyed.

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

hadlock2 years ago

Places like Washington State have had replanting programs in place since well before I was born. In the US we have more trees now than we did 100 years ago, forestry and forest management as a problem was solved 50+ years ago.

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.

jaclaz2 years ago

Of course I cannot access the full text article, but the claim that this HW can be sharpened and become "3 times sharper" than "most commercial table knives" sounds not very scientific.

tgsovlerkhgsel2 years ago

Since "table knife" means the typical dull cutlery knives (as opposed to e.g. steak or kitchen knives), I have no doubt that wood (hardened or not) can be sharpened like that.

ummonk2 years ago

Yeah I suspect they're comparing to cutlery knives out of the box - without any extra sharpening.

jaclaz2 years ago

Not only, a "good" knife can be measured by its sharpness (and still the 3x sounds very little scientific) but also by the durability of its sharpness, there is a a youtube channel[0] by a guy that makes blades out of "everything" and they are actually sharp, but how much do they last (and last sharp enough) is unsaid, and in the end of the citation it seems like they propose these HW knife as a replacement for plastic cutlery.

[0] as an example only a knife made out of plastic bottle material (should be PE): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZnT31JeBTg

ummonk2 years ago

Yeah, and with a Brinell hardness of just 31 I doubt knives made out of this material would hold an edge that well.

moron4hire2 years ago

Sharpness can be quantified, and most table cutlery is probably made from 420 stainless steel. Not a particularly great steel, but very common.

Gatsky2 years ago

(Can't read the damn paper, even with University journal access. Why is academia so fundamentally stupid? Is it not obvious to a scientist that when your paper comes out it would be a good idea for a lot of people to be able to read it?

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.

hammock2 years ago

>Widely used hard materials, e.g., alloys and ceramics, are often nonrenewable and expensive

Alloys and ceramics are non-renewable? Aren't they pure mineral?

raman1622 years ago

I wonder how fire resistant hardened wood is. I can imagine cities like Chicago having a hard time to use wood in commercial buildings with history launch as "The Great Chicago Fire"[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chicago_Fire

jccalhoun2 years ago

From what I've read, they are pretty fire resistant because they are dense and so will char and burn slowly. There have been a couple articles on here in the last couple years about "wooden skyscrapers" and they have made that argument.

account_b2 years ago

I think wood can be quite fire resistant even with traditional modifications like charring. And it may retain structural integrity better/longer than steel. I think steel can become an enemy in a fire quite abruptly.

OldHand20182 years ago

Chicago allows mass timber buildings up to 6 stories, although a developer has proposed an 80-story mass timber building. So that guy may do all the work to open the door.

account_b2 years ago

As far as I know, the Earth's surface cannot meet humanity's current need for hydrocarbons, polymers or building materials. Biomass production is limited by sun energy and most importantly phosphorus and nitrogen cycles. Even hundred of years ago, people were already exhausting regenerative capacities and back then there were only around half a billion humans living on all this planet. Petrol chemistry and mineral exploitation saved Earth's ecosphere short term. But obviously that can't last forever.

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.

engineer_222 years ago

->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.

jnmandal2 years ago

This is pretty clear to me too. We survive on stored energy borrowed from the past. Energy and growth are basically finite. We do need to cut down.

We also need to develop tech (weather technique or technology) to reconstitute waste and refuse into the inputs for our food, buildings, transportation, etc.

account_b2 years ago

> We survive on stored energy borrowed from the past.

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.

jnmandal2 years ago

> 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.

korantu2 years ago

Does it also mean that using wood at industrial scale is bad idea? Trees need phosphorus too

+1
account_b2 years ago
account_b2 years ago

I can only speculate.

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.

vimy2 years ago

We need to mine in space.

jandrese2 years ago

Good luck finding an oil rich asteroid. Or an asteroid with lush virgin hardwood forests.

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.

mikeg82 years ago

I believe one of the problems it solves is that steel has a tendency to erode over time. Hence major infrastructure failures. If structural elements can be made to the same strength as steel, using HW, which will not erode at the same pace of steel, than the expected lifetime of a structure increases and that is solving a real problem.

jandrese2 years ago

Wood is also well known for degrading over time. Their process may prevent some or all of that, but it has yet to be shown from what I've seen.

account_b2 years ago

AFAIK it does solve a problem with steel, tho: Energy expenditure of production. You cannot make steel with heat generated electrically. At least not directly. Energy dense fossil hydrocarbons are powering furnaces today. You may replace that with generated hydrogen, but I am not sure the math checks out on a global scale.

goohle2 years ago

First, we need to marsoform Terra to make mining in space cheaper than mining at Earth.

bhhaskin2 years ago

This. If we want to continue human progress then space is really the only option.

account_b2 years ago

No, that's still ignorant of ecological processes, I think. We need to adapt culturally/economically.

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?

mikeg82 years ago

Really, the only option? You must be joking.

dirtyid2 years ago

Do you have any recommended readings or search terms to explore this subject?

fluxflexer2 years ago

The most interesting thing is the Force/Displacement curve. It shows some plastic deformation even after the breaking point, which is unusual for „hard“ Materials. May this just be some gloryfied Epoxy with wood as filler?

nick2382 years ago

That stress/strain curve in the Cell Matter "Graphical Abstract" is garbage past the point of peak stress. If it's tested in their double shear jig as shown, once it displaces significantly (> radius of the nail) the force is more the pull-out force, basically just the friction between the hole and the nail surface. Or, the nail might just be digging an oblong hole in the shear jig. It's maybe interesting, but a regular stress/strain setup is better to lead with.

The Nature article has some normal stress/strain curves which show brittle failure https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476/figures/6

mensetmanusman2 years ago

It appears they are relying on the hydrogen bonding in the cellulose after lignin removal, so it should be >50% wood, i.e. not an epoxy with wood filler.

dd362 years ago

I’ve seen this before. It starts getting curious at the “chemical treatment” step.

Animats2 years ago

They're taking the lignite out of the cellulose, and then compressing the resulting soft mesh into a harder material. A few years ago, "transparent wood" was a thing. That was taking out the lignite, and putting some transparent plastic in.

Not clear what's special about their compression step.

dan353hehe2 years ago

The heated compression step allows the cellulose to form hydrogen bonds with other cellulose fibers, which strengthens the wood and makes the epoxy redundant.

Animats2 years ago

That's all? No additives during the compression? And nobody figured this out before?

+1
dan353hehe2 years ago
zz8652 years ago

I live in a wood framed 5+1. Its great being in renewable wood building - but the downside is its a huge fire risk. Plus because of this the sprinkler system is vast - and keeps flooding apartments.

colonwqbang2 years ago

One of the steps to produce it seems to be soaking it in mineral oil. Maybe I missed something, but it seems pretty strong to call it renewable if it's made from fossil petroleum.

peatfreak2 years ago

Am I the only person who is irritated by the misuse of the phrase "23-fold", which really means multiplied by 2^23, not multiplied by 23?

telotortium2 years ago
billiam2 years ago

I am totally encouraged by this report. The sentence that really gets me from a companion paper linked below:

"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.

LinuxBender2 years ago

Do knives made from this process set off metal detectors?

_xerces_2 years ago

When ceramic knives are produced, they insert a metal rod into them to ensure that they do set of metal detectors. I imagine they could do something similar here.

ryanmarsh2 years ago

"Hardened wood" = wood cellulose + glue

ummonk2 years ago

Article is paywalled (and sci-hub doesn't work), but the Brinell hardness of 31 while certainly higher than normal hardwoods, is extremely soft compared to metal - softer than even wrought iron without a heat treat. I'm sure it could be made "sharper" than cheap cutlery, but that doesn't mean it will hold an edge well. I'd also be curious how recyclable the material remains after the chemical treatment required to densify it - I would suspect it's like e.g. MDF / plywood which is very bad environmentally due to the glues.

kfprt2 years ago

Usually 'hardened wood' is just wood where the air has been replaced with epoxy. The problem is epoxy is expensive and not different enough from a pure plastic.

dymk2 years ago

I think what you're describing is more often referred to as "stabilized wood", and doesn't involve the "densification" process as described by the infographic.

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).

fhood2 years ago

Stabilized wood is essentially as hard as whatever it's stabilized with. But yeah, the interesting concept is the densification. I dunno about replacing steel, but if soft fast growing woods can be converted into something closer to a hardwood, and the volume lost and extra time still puts it out ahead, that is pretty exciting.

killfauci2 years ago

Fauci needs to be arrested today.

NIH Admits they funded GoF Research at Wuhan.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nih-admits-to-funding-ga...

tomtomftomtom2 years ago