Super wood?
Super wood?
2
SLTA (Structural)
(OP)
This looks interesting...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chemical...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chemical...
Please remember: we're not all guys!






RE: Super wood?
RE: Super wood?
SLTA....thanks for posting, though...always good to know what's going on out there!
RE: Super wood?
RE: Super wood?
It is clearly in initial stages but looks like it has some good prospects.
Will never replace steel but could be used for some beams and sheets maybe.
Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.
RE: Super wood?
Mike McCann, PE, SE (WA)
RE: Super wood?
RE: Super wood?
There are some great developments out there (acetylated wood www.accoya.com/) and I'm not dismissing anything out of hand, but neither am I buying it on the first say-so.
RE: Super wood?
There have been many attempts at the next great thing and many fail because they try too hard to replace the existing standard bearer instead of concentrating on their own key areas. Cost, time, longevity, trying to create a recognized standard for some new material, issues over patents, licensing etc etc can all cause a promising idea to fail to become a recognized product, but you need to give them the initial benefit of the doubt. IMHO.
Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.
RE: Super wood?
RE: Super wood?
"It's a new class of materials with great potential," says Li Teng, a mechanics specialist at the University of Maryland in College Park and a co-author of the study published on 7 February in Nature. Attempts to strengthen wood go back decades. Some efforts have focused on synthesizing new materials by extracting the nanofibres in cellulose -- the hard natural polymer in the tubular cells that funnel water through plant tissue. Li's team took a different approach: the researchers focused on modifying the porous structure of natural wood. First, they boiled different wood types, including oak, in a solution of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite for seven hours. That treatment left the starchy cellulose mostly intact, but created more hollow space in the wood structure by removing some of the surrounding compounds. These included lignin, a polymer that binds the cellulose. Then the team pressed the block -- like a panini sandwich -- at 100C (212F) for a day. The result: a wooden plank one-fifth the thickness, but three times the density of natural wood -- and 11.5 times stronger. Previous attempts to densify wood have improved the strength by a factor of about three to four.
Dik
RE: Super wood?
RE: Super wood?
RE: Super wood?
https://www.roechling.com/industrial/news-detail-v...
Densified wood is used in electric transformers as shims and insulation supports. Many transformer people who are involved in the seismic analysis of transformers were not aware of this.
There are other uses for this also:
https://www.roechling.com/us/industrial/products/c...