Transparent Wood Could Soon Replace Plastics (phys.org) 90
Transparent wood promises to be an environmentally friendly substitute for glass or plastic used for making car windshields, see-through packaging and biomedical devices, according to a study. Phys.Org reports: Originally fabricated in 1992 by German scientist Siegfried Fink and since improved upon by other researchers, transparent wood is made by removing the lignin content in wood and replacing it with transparent, plastic materials. Lignin is a naturally occurring biopolymer which supports plant tissue; unlike plastics it can biodegrade and is non-toxic. According to the authors, production of transparent wood using sodium chlorite to remove lignin from wood and infiltrating it with epoxy infiltration had far less environmental impacts than commonly used methods that rely on the use of methacrylate polymer. The end-of-life analysis suggests that, transparent wood is less environmentally friendly than glass but is still better than producing polyethylene, indicating the need to improve the production technology, the authors said. "Transparent wood is mostly developed using thin slices of wood, and has good strength as that of regular wood but is lighter in weight. The scope for imparting multiple and advanced properties through the incorporation of specialized materials makes it a unique bio-based substrate for versatile applications," said Anish M. Chathoth, an assistant professor at Kerala Agricultural University's College of Forestry, in India.
Still using resin? (Score:2)
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Gonna guess that your aluminum thingy probably has to be formed at high temperatures. Wood tends to burn under those circumstances.
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Dude, it's *ceramic*. If you powder and liquefy it, you'll have mud, basically. Mud isn't a particularly strong material, even once dried.
Re: Still using resin? (Score:2)
Re: Still using resin? (Score:2)
And once youâ(TM)ve heated it, the wood has burned away. See the issue?
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Tell that to the pioneers building in El Norte California in the 1600s. Many of their adobe structures are still standing.
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At a guess, because of the massive power draw involved to get the aluminium. But maybe it'll be less if we throw in recycled cans, like how making glass with a good chunk of recycled glass reduces power use 40%. Though at least here soda cans are apparently partly steel. But there's a reason bauxite smelters are typically close to a hydro power plant or other source of cheap and plentiful power.
"Car windshields" are still glass, AFAIK, so replacing those isn't going to reduce plastics use.
Though transpare
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Nitpick: They still break, but the glass is (heat?)treated so the pieces aren't long sharp shards. .
You're thinking about the side windows, not the front windshield.
Re: Still using resin? (Score:2)
Windshields are tempered glass with a layer of plastic between the glass layers.
Re:Still using resin, Matey? Arghh! (Score:1)
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Why not just use Aluminium oxynitride?
Aluminum oxynitride is great for bulletproof glass but too rigid and too expensive to fabricate into soda bottles and grocery bags.
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Even if you ignore the cost/energy required to isolate elemental aluminium from ore
That's not very expensive.
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That is exceptionally expensive. This is why pretty much all bauxite refineries sit in spots where energy is exceptionally cheap, and why we haul bauxite ore very long distances in some cases to be refined.
Because that's one of the most energy intensive industrial processes in existence for modern industrial refining of widely consumed material.
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I want to use aluminum oxynitride, but it's expensive and there aren't many tutorials for how to work with it.
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filament.
i am thinking of 3d printing using this material.
what would filament generation be like when evaluating this material
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In general I am a fan of a more diverse sets of materials that are used. Transparent wood, while still used a lot of "plastic" uses less plastic than an all plastic material. Aluminum based materials too have a good use that can replace plastic.
For some reason when we see new products we think of them in an all or nothing approach. While my home has AC, I will still use a fan. I also use Glass, where Plastic could be a viable option, I may have metal objects, where they could be also made out of Wood..
Plastic replaced with... plastic? (Score:5, Insightful)
How is plastic a replacement for plastic?
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Re:Plastic replaced with... plastic? (Score:5, Insightful)
> removing the lignin content in wood and replacing it with transparent, plastic materials
How is plastic a replacement for plastic?
TFA is just as confusing! It's better for the environment than glass, except that it's slightly worse than the environment than glass. But it can replace polythene (e.g. PVC), that is "plastic". It's a good replacement because it's wood that's infused with plastic.
The main thing I got out of the article is that some people who hold the patents on this product want it to be used a lot more.
Why that would be better for the environment is beyond my comprehension of this article.
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"It tastes like plastic because it's MADE from plastic!"
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It seems like pure plastics would be easier to recycle, and if we can farm plastic eating microbes then maybe we can get rid of a lot of it. Combining it with wood only seems to make those things more difficult.
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Right now we're actually pretty terrible at recycling plastic, and only a small percentage gets recycled, so this could easily be an improvement. At least the wood part would biodegrade.
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Then again if Russia / the Kingdom (SA) / OPEC in general keep playing stupid games they might just end up winning stupid prizes. Assuming the price of oil stays artificially high due to war and
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Aren't there transparent metals
No. Transparent materials may contain metallic elements, but they are not metals. The only way a metal can pass light is if it is super thin.
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Transparent Aluminum
It was invented by Montgomery Scott in 1984
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Re:Plastic replaced with... plastic? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrapping my head around this (Score:2)
Transparent Wood Could Soon Replace Plastics ... transparent wood is made by removing the lignin content in wood and replacing it with transparent, plastic materials.
So, we're going to replace plastics with transparent wood, that's full of plastics? ... :-)
Mr. McGuire would be so proud
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Re: Wrapping my head around this (Score:1)
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Plastic infused wood is less plastic than just plastic
...which nobody is using for windows outside of racing. If transparent wood doesn't explode into a zillion pieces when it breaks (which is NOT A GIVEN) then it might be a viable replacement for lexan, but it's not going to replace glass.
Re: Wrapping my head around this (Score:3)
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It's just hard to see how this is going to ever be feasible for making containers. And if you wanted to imagine something even less recyclable than a plastic container... here it is.
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spam, egg, sausage and spam.... that's not got much spam in it...
Re: Wrapping my head around this (Score:2)
Or... (Score:2)
Maybe not?
No. (Score:2)
Unless it is cheaper than plastic or mandated by the state then this will go nowhere.
Whatever (Score:2)
What a silly post (Score:3)
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Agreed that windscreen is the wrong choice. However, non-transparent wood-plastics composites (WPC) do have a place in building, thanks to an incredible touch and great sculpting ability. They are already widely used in exterior floorings, and are readily available at your local materials shop.
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Laminated timber is widely used in construction in many places which produce wood in large numbers. The main advances recently have been in specific load modelling of laminates, i.e. how and in what shapes you glue things together to ensure good load bearing capacity.
We can even build indoor sports stadiums with almost all load bearing elements being made out of laminated timber nowadays because of this with actually fairly small amounts of timber compared to what you would need a few decades ago. But that
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I don't know - if they can improve the transparency, a heavily carbon-fiber reinforced windscreen sounds like it could offer some very appealing safety properties
And if InventWood's version is any guide, that's what the transparent wood is - wood's carbon fiber cellulose matrix with the normal lignin and other natural glues replaced with transparent resin that may actually be much stronger.
And in their process, once the natural binders are removed the remaining carbon-fiber matrix is incredibly flexible, li
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I admit the plastic aspect is... concerning. But I think relatively specialist applications are the least of our worries on that front. A windshield is such a tiny percentage of the average person's plastic waste that it's not worth concerning ourselves with at this point.
Personally, I'm much more interested in the applications of MettleWood though. Cheap, moldable, compostable carbon-fiber slab has some enormous potential. The all natural wood-grain finish is an added bonus.
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Nevertheless, we live in interesting times: We are coming close to be able to accurately simulate quantum level interactions of complex mole
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Yeah, glass has much to recommend it, and insofar as we can limit ourselves to only a few colors, it's easily recyclable. It's really too bad that there's a subset of people that insist on breaking it in dangerous places. And that so many of the specialty applications involve laminates that are difficult to recycle.
Exotic woods... I'm not sure how much market there really is. Regardless of properties, for a good commercial product you need to consider the production-lifetime opportunity cost. And you cou
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None of my argument against them hinged on them being exotic.
Rather, generally they're exotic for exactly the same reason they're not widely used anymore - they grow slowly, and thus can not be farmed as easily or as profitably as alternative crops.
Like petroleum, their affordable market value was based on being able to rapidly strip-mine a large store of value that took a long time to produce. If you have to produce it "from scratch", it's just too expensive to be worth the effort.
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I believe we share most views. I think that it is interesting though – I mean, for instance, minerals, oil and gas take ... (tens of) millions of years to produce, whereas slow-growth wood take 'mere' centuries. In terms of economy, stuff like Waddywood grows in harsh environments which are currently not being used for any form of commercial exploitation: I can see a lot of reasons for investing in the (extremely cheap) land that such a wood grows in, and initialising a farm of such wood. Needless to
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But how would the people who bought those futures profit? After all, the only way they're giving you their money is if there's a clear road to higher (or less risky) profits than all the other opportunities in the world. You think the value of your futures on a possible payout centuries in the future is going to be able to offer that?
And speaking of risk - you're talking about accumulating centuries of ongoing care-taking costs. You need to protect against disease, drought, poaching, storms, etc. - any o
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Yes, yes, yes.. – but modern financial engines work to all those questions. Risk is bought and sold just like any other commodity– in many ways, it's just yet another futures market - like pork bellies, or fresh squeezed orange juice - which also bear the same risks. One can still put in a future bid for pork bellies in 10 years time - the futures market is the bookmaker of bankers.
High risk ventures are great – shorting a high risk can pay out handsomely. You don't have to wait 400 ye
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Again, It's not a question of whether there's a long term market - it's whether that market promises to be profitable enough to be worth running a farm at a loss for centuries for a possible future payoff.
The question is, what's the realistic market value of beautiful, renewable "hardened aluminum" that costs maybe 10,000x as much as actual hardened aluminum to produce, and 30,000x as much as far stronger and similarly beautiful and renewable MettleWood? Not to mention all the even more exotic materials th
so no substitute for glass (Score:3)
The end-of-life analysis suggests that, transparent wood is less environmentally friendly than glass
So it's not substitute for glass, as I certainly don't believe it last longer than regular glass. durability is also a factor that needs to be kept in mind, as if it only lasts for 5 years compared to a normal plastic version which will last 15 years then I still think it's better to use the normal plastic version.
Transparent? (Score:4, Informative)
Quite a few comments, but none pointed out this is not "transparent", it's "translucent". Pretty big difference.
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Especially when they are talking about making car windshields with it.
Re:Transparent? (Score:4, Funny)
So use it for the windshields of self-driving cars. Sorted!
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So use it for the windshields of self-driving cars. Sorted!
Sorry I commented already, would have +1 Funny
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Which makes sense since the title is, "TRANSPARENT wood could soon replace plastics'"
Durability? (Score:2)
How long would this material last in real life conditions? In heat, humidity, rain and frost? How long before it would decompose naturally, rending your product useless?
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Unknown, as its very much in early prototype stages. And unlikely to go anywhere.
Has someone put graphene in it yet? (Score:2)
You know it's coming! It will be the BEST insulator, the BEST conductor, totally transparent and the blackest substance known to mankind. A microgram of the stuff will stretch to the moon and have the tensile strength of a million spiderweb filaments, yet be a quarter the width of a human hair and have the weight of a grain of sand. Gawd the future is exciting!!!
The one where Spock dies. (Score:3)
Misnamed wood (Score:2)
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What's the problem with glass? (Score:2)
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It's not entirely clear, but the best I could get from the poorly-written article, is the amount of heat (energy) required to produce glass, compared to this wood product.
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Modern definition of environmentally unfriendly is "anything that is a product of human activity that isn't directly sources from primeval sources". It's why even wood is ultimately bitched at by the same people as environmentally unfriendly because we mostly grow it in controlled conditions in forests. And have done so for many millenia, forest management is the original environmental management skill humans developed before farming revolution.
It's why primeval forests don't really exist anywhere where hum
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And have done so for many millenia, forest management is the original environmental management skill humans developed before farming revolution.
Actually: no.
Forrests where for the most of the time of human existence simply exploited.
That we do "manage" them is a petty recent - roughly 100 years - development.
Someone could give me a million dollars. (Score:2)
It's not a likely scenario, but it could happen.
Keyboard? How quaint. (Score:3)
Transparent aluminum or GTFO.
This is old (Score:4, Interesting)
Apparently you can get much better clarity using hydrogen peroxide and UV light instead of sodium chlorite.
We make epoxies and we have done this a few times using the older methods and it does work, but hydrogen peroxide appears to brings a glass like clarity to the wood. I will be trying that next week during lab day.
Ultraprocessed wood (Score:2)
This "transparent wood" is apparently ultraprocessed. That can't be good!
The concept is the easy part (Score:2)
As any software developer knows, the concept, and even the "proof of concept," is the easy part. Bringing it to market, scaling up the process to handle large quantities, getting people to actually use your creation--those are the hard parts.
Does it need to be transparent? (Score:2)
All these comments... (Score:2)
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Where is my transparent mask? (Score:2)
If they can make wood transparent, then they could do the same with a face mask!
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The surgical masks are made of fibers with typical diameter 10 um, also the size of particles in a cloud. This fabric scatters light into milky white, even though the fibers are transparent. The not dyed are white. The transparent/translucent wood/plastic composite can be made so because it is a bulk material, it does not contain interfaces with air and therefore scatters much less (scattering happens at interfaces between materials of different refraction index).
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Yes, I've seen that explanation before, and I even think your grasp of the physics is better than mine, but I still think there should be some way to solve the problem. Even earn a patent for a non-obvious solution, but certainly some solution better than the rigid plastic face shields they are selling now. (Just read another book that was largely about the vast variety of plastic materials that are available, though this Slashdot story led in the direction of doing something similar with more "organic" mat
Underrated pun (Score:3)
I'd like to take a moment to appreciate the department under which this was posted: The wood-you-look-at-that dept.
Thank you for the smile BeauHD.
Different Transparent Wood (Score:2)
Ok, this is weird, but something you could theoretically do at home, provided you can get concentrated H2O2. Watch the clip, it is a serious WTF!? moment.
Transparent Wood [phys.org]
And the paper [science.org]
It really is simple. And you can make ~30% H2O2 (what the experiment used) at home [wordpress.com].
Bullshit. (Score:2)
The scope for plastic replacement is negligible when it comes to the overall picture. Where polyacrlylics are aused they are often used for specific properties that are not just transparency.
Meanwhile other plastics that can't be replaced by wood are many orders of magnitude more frequently used.
So fuck the 'environmentally friendly' label. It won't do shit in the real world.