A US firm has engineered a brand new sort of wooden that it says has as much as 10 times the strength-to-weight ratio of steel, whereas additionally being as much as six times lighter.
“Superwood” has simply launched as a industrial product, manufactured by InventWood, an organization co-founded by materials scientist Liangbing Hu.
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Over a decade in the past, Hu set out on a quest to reinvent one of many oldest constructing supplies identified to humankind. While working on the University of Maryland’s Center for Materials Innovation, Hu, who’s now a professor at Yale, discovered modern methods to re-engineer wooden. He even made it transparent by eradicating a part of one among its key elements, lignin, which provides wooden its colour and a few of its energy.
His actual aim, nonetheless, was to make wooden stronger, utilizing cellulose, the principle element of plant fiber and “the most abundant biopolymer on the planet,” in keeping with Hu.
The breakthrough got here in 2017, when Hu first strengthened common wooden by chemically treating it to reinforce its pure cellulose, making it a greater development materials.
The wooden was first boiled in a shower of water and chosen chemical compounds, then hot-pressed to break down it on the mobile stage, making it considerably denser. At the top of the weeklong course of, the ensuing wooden had a strength-to-weight ratio “higher than that of most structural metals and alloys,” in keeping with the examine published within the journal Nature.
Now, after years of Hu perfecting the method and submitting over 140 patents, Superwood has launched commercially.
“From a chemical and a practical standpoint, it’s wood,” defined InventWood CEO Alex Lau, who joined the enterprise in 2021. In buildings, that might enable for buildings probably as much as 4 times lighter than at present, Lau stated, that means they’d be extra earthquake resistant, in addition to simpler on foundations, making development sooner and simpler.
“It looks just like wood, and when you test it, it behaves like wood,” Lau added, “except it’s much stronger and better than wood in pretty much every aspect that we’ve tested.”
InventWood is manufacturing Superwood in its plant in Frederick, Maryland, and though the manufacturing time is now measured in hours moderately than days, it would take a while to scale up, Lau stated.
Initially, the corporate plans to deal with exterior functions equivalent to decking and cladding, earlier than transferring on to inner functions equivalent to wall paneling, flooring and residential furnishings someday subsequent yr.
“People always complain that furniture breaks down over time, and that’s often because it sags or breaks down at the joints, which are currently made of metal because wood isn’t strong enough,” stated Lau. Superwood might be used to exchange these components, he stated, in addition to screws, nails and different metallic fasteners.
Eventually, Lau initiatives that a whole constructing might be constructed out of Superwood, though that might require extra testing.
Much like in Hu’s unique experiment, the wooden is strengthened through a chemical course of that alters the fundamental construction of the cellulose and is compressed very tightly with out springing again. “In theory, we can use any kind of wooden material,” Lau stated. “In practice, we’ve tested with 19 different kinds of species of wood as well as bamboo, and it’s worked on all of them.”
InventWood says Superwood is as much as 20 times stronger than common wooden and as much as 10 times extra proof against dents, as a result of the pure porous construction of the wooden has been collapsed and toughened. That makes it impervious to fungi and bugs. It additionally will get the best ranking in commonplace hearth resistance checks.
Superwood presently prices extra than common wooden and likewise has a bigger manufacturing carbon footprint, however Lau stated that in comparison with steel manufacturing, the carbon emissions are 90% decrease.
He added that the goal is “not to be cheaper than wood, but to be competitive with steel,” when manufacturing scales up.
Other kinds of engineered wooden have existed as development supplies for a very long time, however InventWood says that these are merely rearranged items of wooden which are held along with adhesives, moderately than wooden that has been altered on the molecular stage like Superwood.
Timber development has had a resurgence in recent times, and wooden is now used to construct skyscrapers. The metropolis of Milwaukee — which already hosts the world’s tallest timber tower, the 284-foot (87-meter) Ascent MKE — has revealed plans to construct a good taller one, at a whopping 600 ft (183 meters) in top.
Currently, concrete is by far the most-used development materials on Earth, and despite the fact that its manufacturing has plateaued in recent times, making concrete generates 7% of the world’s international carbon emissions.
Philip Oldfield, an structure professor and head of the School of Built Environment on the University of New South Wales, in Australia, who just isn’t concerned with InventWood, stated timber has environmental advantages over many different constructing supplies as its manufacturing processes are much less intensive than steel and concrete, and timber shops CO2 in its woody biomass by photosynthesis. “Wood products can be considered a long-term carbon storage system, and construction with wood could see our cities ‘lock in’ carbon emission in buildings for long periods of time,” he added.
However, he factors out that current engineered timber merchandise are already competing with steel and concrete. “The barrier to more timber buildings isn’t really the need for more strength,” he defined, “it’s that the construction industry is risk averse and slow to change.”
To see extra timber in buildings, he argued, we’d like higher training, pilot initiatives and improved regulatory frameworks: “But stronger timber products like this Superwood could allow architects to create larger spans and more durable finishes with timber, which would certainly be beneficial and could foster greater timber uptake.”