InventWood Is About To Mass-Produce Wood That's Stronger Than Steel (techcrunch.com) 74
Longtime Slashdot reader ndsurvivor shares a report from TechCrunch: In 2018, Liangbing Hu, a materials scientist at the University of Maryland, devised a way to turn ordinary wood into a material stronger than steel. It seemed like yet another headline-grabbing discovery that wouldn't make it out of the lab. "All these people came to him," said Alex Lau, CEO of InventWood, "He's like, OK, this is amazing, but I'm a university professor. I don't know quite what to do about it."
Rather than give up, Hu spent the next few years refining the technology, reducing the time it took to make the material from more than a week to a few hours. Soon, it was ready to commercialize, and he licensed the technology to InventWood. Now, the startup's first batches of Superwood will be produced starting this summer. "Right now, coming out of this first-of-a-kind commercial plant -- so it's a smaller plant -- we're focused on skin applications," Lau said. "Eventually we want to get to the bones of the building. Ninety percent of the carbon impact from buildings is concrete and steel in the construction of the building." To build the factory, InventWood has raised $15 million in the first close of a Series A round. The round was led by the Grantham Foundation with participation from Baruch Future Ventures, Builders Vision, and Muus Climate Partners, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. How do they do it? According to TechCrunch, InventWood's Superwood is made by treating regular timber with "food industry" chemicals to remove lignin and modify its structure, then compressing it to increase hydrogen bonding between cellulose fibers. This densification makes the wood up to 10 times stronger than natural wood, with a higher strength-to-weight ratio than steel. "You end up with something that looks like these richer, tropical hardwoods," Lau added.
Rather than give up, Hu spent the next few years refining the technology, reducing the time it took to make the material from more than a week to a few hours. Soon, it was ready to commercialize, and he licensed the technology to InventWood. Now, the startup's first batches of Superwood will be produced starting this summer. "Right now, coming out of this first-of-a-kind commercial plant -- so it's a smaller plant -- we're focused on skin applications," Lau said. "Eventually we want to get to the bones of the building. Ninety percent of the carbon impact from buildings is concrete and steel in the construction of the building." To build the factory, InventWood has raised $15 million in the first close of a Series A round. The round was led by the Grantham Foundation with participation from Baruch Future Ventures, Builders Vision, and Muus Climate Partners, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. How do they do it? According to TechCrunch, InventWood's Superwood is made by treating regular timber with "food industry" chemicals to remove lignin and modify its structure, then compressing it to increase hydrogen bonding between cellulose fibers. This densification makes the wood up to 10 times stronger than natural wood, with a higher strength-to-weight ratio than steel. "You end up with something that looks like these richer, tropical hardwoods," Lau added.
NileRed tried this (Score:5, Informative)
"Making bulletproof wood"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Following the procedure in the paper discussed in the article, he was able to make a sample of wood quite a bit stronger. Not quite as strong as the article suggests but there's definitely credibility behind it.
=Smidge=
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I think how it ages and how time affects its integrity will be very important too.
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It should do relatively well. As far as I am aware it's lignin that is involved in a big chunk of the decay process.
This process seems to remove lignin. So that makes me optimistic.
Burn it. (Score:1)
See if it holds better than skyscraper steel.
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Don't be silly. Jet fuel doesn't melt engineered wood!
Re: Burn it. (Score:3)
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You can cut steel anywhere, any time, if you have a generator, compressor, and plasma cutter. Only the third of these things is not commonly found on a typical job site, and they are now quite reasonably affordable.
You could also do it with a torch of course, but then you have to deal with the bottles and they are a hassle.
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Steel materials not so much, has to be pre-fabbed. Lets see if its UV rated and weather rated over time.
What? Steel is cut all the time. It may take different tools to cut steel depending on the thickness which makes it less appealing. However for the purposes that are described: roof boarding, siding, etc. it is not very thick steel.
To consumers? (Score:5, Funny)
Is there a chance of this making it to the consumer market? I really want to have wood this hard.
There are pills for that (Score:1)
I guess youâ(TM)ll have to just settle for that large handful of pills you take instead called âoeViagra.â But at least the blood pressure from your morbid obesity will lessen this way!
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Is there a chance of this making it to the consumer market? I really want to have wood this hard.
Seems like a missed opportunity that they didn't get Beavis and Butthead to be their celebrity endorsers.
"Heh heh heh. Wood. Booooing!"
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I have a piece of algonquin yellow pine that was cut over 100 years ago -- old growth wood and a long time to cure. Have wrecked a carbide blade trying to cut it... pretty impressive stuff if you let the trees grow slowly over the years and then let the cut lumber dry slowly. Nothing like modern wood that is rushed to market -- the growth ring spacing shows it.
vehicle making could be a thing (Score:1)
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I was thinking this could offer a cheap alternative that could compete with carbon fiber unibodies or monocoques. Maybe a spaceframe of Superwood tubes connected by 3d-printed titanium joints? Traditional spaceframes are only expensive due to the highly skilled welding labor needed to assemble them and the fact that the tubes are either individually hand-cut or machine-cut in small batches at most.
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Or they first shape it, then harden it? The density might rule out any weight savings. I wonder if its impervious to termites and carpenter bees.
Re: vehicle making could be a thing (Score:1)
Aluminum is commonly fastened using multiple methods in a single application. I forget how many methods Audi said was used on the A8, but it was more than half a dozen.
Re: vehicle making could be a thing (Score:2)
My troll is going limp. They're only able to mod down one post a day. I bet there is a medication for that.
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"Amiga 64 Commodore"?
Wood stronger than steel (Score:1)
Isn't that catchphrase already used by Viagra?
Why replace concrete and steel? (Score:2)
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Steel and concrete production and recycling also cause a pretty large amount of pollution, and are prohibitively heavy, and are both also technically finite resources. We can grow more trees, and besides, it sounds like they already are targeting one of the major plastic uses in construction as well with this stuff, as an alternative for vinyl siding.
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Both require an awful lot of carbon to make them in the first place. To recycle it, steel needs to be recast, which uses a whole lot more carbon all over again. Concrete isn't really recyclable per-se, but it's re-usable as aggregate. That process needs some energy to perform, so more carbon again. If I remember my chemistry, when concrete sets is gives off CO2, so the fact that your aggregate is recycled really doesn't mean much - it's still going to give off a load of CO2.
I haven't run the numbers, but if
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Both require an awful lot of carbon to make them in the first place. To recycle it, steel needs to be recast, which uses a whole lot more carbon all over again. Concrete isn't really recyclable per-se, but it's re-usable as aggregate.
And the article waxes lyrical about the properties of this 'superwood', but doesn't say a word about how energy-intensive it is to make. It could require a bigger carbon cost than smelting steel. And if it's compressed by 4x (from the article), that would be, essentially, taking a 2x4 and making a 1x2 out of it, so the resulting volume is smaller, and until the laws are changed to recognize that this material is stronger and doesn't need as much volume for the same strength, building codes are going to requ
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On the code updates, you're right, but it wouldn't replace 2x4 and 2x6 and 2x8 you use in walls and floors. Those are driven as much by other factors (spacing required to nail sheetrock too) and depth needed for insulation to function than they are structural requirements.
Where it would be powerful in residential is when you are replacing steel or Glue-lam beams. In those cases, a structural engineer is calculating the loads on each beam and spec-ing it in the permit with the calculations, so the city wou
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Also I can see some framing work (depending on the cost (US uses a lot of wood in residential framing.. (because wood can be adjusted on-site..)).. So its not going to replace "concrete/steel".. its just a stronger wood that would be used in places where wood would normally be used anyway.. but instead of it being super rare woods (like iron wood
Carbon Capture vs Release (Score:2)
Those are two of the most recyclable materials on the planet.
Making steel and concrete releases a lot of CO2 and concrete can't effectively be recycled back into usable concrete, it gets crushed into gravel and steel usually get recycled into lower quality steel than may be unsuitable for building. However, making wood involves growing trees that capture CO2 from the air. So provided the processing of the wood does not involve releasing a lot of CO2 we'd actually be capturing CO2 to make buildings instead of releasing it.
Transparent wood (Score:3)
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nah, that just required polishing your wood several times a day
Its not wood (Score:3)
Its just a harder version of MDF.
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Very small churches.
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Not only does MDF NOT have the lignin removed, it is similar in density to regular wood (medium density - duh, it's right in the name). This engineered wood does have the lignin removed, and it is roughly twice the density of regular wood.
Furthermore, while the article does mention potential applications using chips to make pre-shaped pieces like fiberboard, beams, and moldings, the stuff they are selling now is NOT chipped and leaves the original grain intact.
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" it is similar in density to regular wood"
Which regular wood would that be, oak maybe? Pine? Balsa? Your attempt to sound smart just fell off a cliff. Better luck next time mate.
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It does not look like MDF. They seem to process planks of wood not wood dust mashe. All pictures there show boards that look like wood with grains though this can be just marketing, idk?
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No! No! No! MDF is garbage in comparison (Score:2)
Its just a harder version of MDF.
WTAF? Have you never taken a science class in that you don't know how a plant is structured?...or have you never actually touched wood? MDF is sawdust and glue. Wood is always stronger because microscopically (actually visibly as well, if you have young eyes), it's looks like a bunch of drinking straws. The structure is pretty regular and the molecular bonds are very strong. MDF is weak, has little strength, is very heavy, it's not even that cheap, and it's ugly AF. Under the microscope, you can see
How is it for insturments? (Score:2)
Anyone know?
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Re:How is it for insturments? (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the audible performance not from the strings themselves Is due to the physical shape and not any dynamic properties of the material the instrument itself is made from, at least after a note is struck.
The material matters a lot. The top (resonating) plate of a violin is nearly always made from spruce, because it has particular qualities as a tonewood. So it's quite reasonable to wonder "I wonder how this new wood product would work as a tonewood?"
(Unfortunately, I don't know enough about tonewoods to make a prediction here. One thing you'll read about spruce is that it has a high "stiffness to weight ratio", allowing you to create a thinner top plate, and I would suppose that this new wood product has an even better "stiffness to weight ratio". But I'm sure that's not the only factor that matters.... if it were, they'd be making top plates out of titanium or something).
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The material matters a lot. The top (resonating) plate of a violin is nearly always made from spruce, because it has particular qualities as a tonewood. So it's quite reasonable to wonder "I wonder how this new wood product would work as a tonewood?"
If you shaped a violin like a acoustic guitar it would greatly change the sound, whereas making the body, neck, or other parts from different woods would make a much smaller change. It’s basic physics.
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I was thinking of an electric guitar.
Would denser wood allow for increased sustain?
I want some. (Score:2)
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Wood Jerry, Wood! (Score:3)
Great, another reason to destroy more forests (Score:2)
Great, another reason to destroy more forests around the world.
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Sustainable forestry is easier on the environment than mining iron ore or limestone for concrete
About half of timber cuts are clear cuts, so only about half of forestry is even potentially sustainable.
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Great, another reason to destroy more forests around the world.
Actually, that's exactly what we should be doing: planting gob-smacking numbers of trees, turn them into manageable-sized bits, burying them in the ground where the carbon came from, and then planting more trees, ad nauseum. Planting fast-growing trees might not be the sexiest way of capturing carbon, but it works, really, really well.
Wood. What CAN'T it do? (Score:2)
*This message brought to you by the Wood council.
Improved version of acetylated wood? (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
That's been around for awhile.
If you Google kibbie dome construction you can see some pictures of large scale wood composite construction.
In the same idea they also built another largish building.
https://opsisarch.com/project/... [opsisarch.com]
Lab grown old growth wood (Score:2)
My house was build in the late 1800s, and the wood is so dense that you cannot drill into it with a power drill. There is a wooden ship in the Boston harbor that has sides so thick cannon balls bounced off. They have figured out how to recreate this in the lab, which is a good thing. Now if only 2x4 were really 2x4 ;)
seems quick to market (Score:3)
It seems quick to market. I have so many questions.
What about the off gassing if any?
Are we just creating another forever material that we can't break back down? Can it just be thrown out or treated differently for all excess material?
What happens when there's a fire in the house? Is it going to release awful chemicals?
Build space ships out of InventWood? (Score:2)
Image a space ship built in orbit using standard carpentry tools, like saws, miter boxes, drills and screws. Caulk the joints with air tight material and then, line the inside with air tight plastic sheeting, you then get a breathable module. Or better yet, find a air tight stain, and use attractive finishes on the hull.
True, you would probably still want metal hatches and hatch surrounds, due to the constant use. An
Re: Build space ships out of InventWood? (Score:2)
Gee, if it has better properties than steel, can we build space ships out of InventWood?
Why not? They've already tried it with satellites. [theguardian.com]
Wood for musical instruments? (Score:1)
I wonder if this wood would be good for making musical instruments? A lot of the sound of a violin is in the hardness of the wood and the ring structure. It is speculated that part of the special sound of a Stradivarius violin is due to the fact it was made from trees that grew very slowly so the growth rings were very tight. But even if that is not so, it could replace teak or ironwood in places like fingerboards.
Food industry chemicals on RFK Jr's approved list? (Score:2)
treating regular timber with "food industry" chemicals
Are those "food industry" chemicals on RFK Jr's approved list?