> Ultimately, InventWood is planning to use wood chips to create structural beams of any dimension that won’t need finishing. “Imagine your I-beams look like this,” Lau said, holding up a sample of Superwood. “They’re beautiful, like walnut, ipe. These are the natural colors. We haven’t stained any of this.”
This is so spot on. The fact that there isn't a single image showing an ACTUAL comparison, even of small samples, is a massive red flag for a company that is advocating the "aesthetic" properties of it's product.
Then, even worse, they RELY ENTIRELY ON UNLABELED AI GENERATED IMAGES.
I cannot imagine a better way to say "there's a high chance everything we've promised is fake news". Just make sure to squint before looking at our ad copy!
This is a relaunch. Here's their launch video from May 2024.[1]
The video has some CG of a piece of their wood, plus stock shots of trees, cities, wind turbines, people looking through microscopes, etc.
U. of Maryland announced this specific process back in 2018.[2] They got a paper into Nature.[3]
Densified wood is over a century old. [4] You can buy something called "Lignostone".[5] But that is a material where they took the lignin out and put some plastic in. (Remember "transparent wood" from a few years ago. Same concept, with a transparent plastic.)
This new process takes the lignin out and compresses the cell structure.
If you could send in $20 and get a little cube of the stuff to look at and test, this would be more convincing.
Thanks for the link! As pessimistic as I am toward this company it sounds like something that could be quite neat if it actually exists.
However, I lost all hope (of the little I had) after their sales rep said they "densify" their wood. My dude, if you need to spin so hard you pull out a thesaurus for "compress" it's not a great look.
Because they don't just compress their wood! That's the step after putting it in a vacuum and baking it and heating it up so that the lignin depolymerizes. The video does a great job of explaining how this is different from just sticking wood into a press.
Sure did. You're right it seems to be in use widely (in the wood compression industry), not that it seems to have any distinction from compression... (I say from my uninformed perspective)
E.g. it feels along the lines of "we didn't just heat it, we THERMO-MODIFIED (tm) it." No matter they mean the same thing, doesn't the second one just sound cooler?!? /s
Same ilk as "deconstructed" food, "artisanal" crafts, "synergy", ...
in a mechanical sense, a compressed object goes back to normal when the stress is removed, unless you break it. if the work piece did not go back to its original shape, you arent just conpressing anymore. eg. you are likely "cold working" it instead.
if youre applying heat, you might be "forging" or "casting" while applying that compressive force.
I definitely am negatively biased toward anything I perceive using buzz words or jargon. I doubt I'm the only person with this knee jerk reaction (I say without any statistics or evidence I can link in).
Same with any product that is over or deceptively advertised.
If their stuff was good, provably so, then they'd prove it on their own merits. They wouldn't need to fill a website with 99% AI slop if they had anything else of any substance.
Or, it's definitely possible I'm in the % of people who is overly sensitive to bullshit, and I fall outside the target audience of their AI slop. Similarly to how spam emails include typos to filter out people who are actually paying attention.
> I definitely am negatively biased toward anything I perceive using buzz words or jargon.
Unfortunately every profession with any depth of knowledge will have jargon. Even house staff at a restaurant will talk about 2-tops and 4-tops, etc. It's just jargon, or better yet, convenient abstraction to describe the problem space these people live and breath.
I know it's practically cliche to say so these days, but that picture is giving strong AI vibes. Look at the joints between the big beams. If you needed beams that large to hold up a building, you wouldn't cut them in the middle like that. And you wouldn't have those gaps.
Plus, all the text on the page is future tense, talking about what the super wood beams will be able to do.
So I don't know how much that picture really represents what the wood will look like.
There are lots of posts from them on the internet image search...and it seems they've gone to a number of industry conferences with samples.
I agree, that from a PR perspective, their pictures are too polished. They should show a piece in a less polished format.
wow that image is pretty bad; all sorts of weird inconsistencies in the wood stack that scream AI; I'm ignoring the license gibberish as that could be just removal of identifying info.
Yeah, inspecting the picture closely there are at least 20 to 30 things that immediately stand out as "AI did this". There are so many things wrong with those chairs on the right. The wood support beams are just not right, nobody would build like this.
But I’m not sure if it a real photo or some sort of… analogy? Under “INTRODUCING SUPERWOOD: THE NEXT GENERATION OF BUILDING MATERIALS,” we can see one piece that looks like an actual piece of wood, and then some other ones that looks like an artificial wood-looking finish wrapped around some core which visually looks metallic (but which, I assume, is actually their engineered wood).
I dunno. I guess “being wood” is more about the ecological impact in this case. If it is replacing steel and it looks ugly, well, a lot of steel looks ugly and then gets covered up.
Yes the final product will preserve the wood grain in some form. The paper has a few images of the final product. They basically boil out all the non-cellulose and compress what remains into a smaller form. I assume the strength is that a super board of the same size would be made of several boards' worth of wood fibers. I haven't read enough yet, but I wonder if this substantially lowers weight / strength. Right now, steel is required for tall buildings because there is an upper limit to how high you can go before wood buckles. There are no 300 m trees after all.
fwiw, I first thought this was going to be some innovation in glue, which allows manufacturers to turn wood chips and sawdust into MDF, OSB, and particle board. These are typically weaker than sawyered beams of the same size because the glue is not as strong as the cellulose fibers that run the length of a beam. (However, they are getting applied more and more in the construction in the US because it is crazy expensive to find a tree that can produce thick enough 40 ft beams, but you can easily get enough sawdust to make an even thicker, precut MDF board.) But I thought no shot, because if you can make glue that is stronger than cellulose, then why bother with the wood?
Someone posted what's probably the study it's based on below, it looks to be Figure 2d and 10e. As suggested, it's just darkened in a nice looking way (without stain) which frankly doesn't seem like it's necessarily a good thing.
"First, natural wood blocks were immersed in a boiling aqueous solution of mixed 2.5 M NaOH and 0.4 M Na2SO3 for 7 h, followed by immersion in boiling deionized water several times to remove the chemicals. Next, the wood blocks were pressed at 100 °C under a pressure of about 5 MPa for about 1 day to obtain the densified wood"
My thoughts as well. I was holding a board the other day and it just seemed, forgive me, aerosol-ized. Like those Aero chocolates that are essentially full of bubbles. "This new wood doesn't feel like wood used to" and shook my fist at the passing cloud.
I have high hopes for this product as a leg of sustainability.
It's true that dimensions are all screwy, evidently due to variable shrinkage during drying in the old days. The mills control for it now, but meanwhile everyone got used to the weird sizes and we're stuck with them because everyone centered on the shrunk sizes for tooling and standards. Pros know but it's a pain for DIYers.
> It's true that dimensions are all screwy, evidently due to variable shrinkage during drying in the old days.
That's just an old wives tale.
Lumber shrinks for money reasons, older lumber is bigger [1] with sequential revisions to the standard decreasing it's real size [2] [3] (the difference between 2in and 15/8in in strength is minimal however you can keep doing that math, and they did, to go down from 2in to 1.5in over a century).
Lumber shrinks, but not that much. There was NO standard and so mills just did what felt they could get away with calling a 2x4. Some mills did 2x4 was 2"x4", some did other sizes, it depending on how much they felt they could cheat vs how much they felt advertising the larger size would help. I have seen houses built in 1880 that used modern dimensions for 2x4s.
> In seriousness, nominal vs actual sizing is just terrible. Do places outside of North America do this too?
I understand the origins of this. But I've never understood why we haven't moved on to actual sizing given the scale at which standardized lumber dimensions are produced
I'm just glad there is a standard. It doesn't matter much what size it is. What matters is that I can go to any lumber yard/mill when I need more and get it. What matters is that I and my inspector can look at (or more likely memorize!) some charts and be sure that everything is strong enough. Is actually 2"x4" lumber stronger than the standard sizes - yes, but most of the time it doesn't matter, and if it does I really want to step up to 2x6 (or something) because margin of safety is important when you get that close)
Here in NL stone is the traditional building material too, so it's not uncommon to see houses built of wood, but covered in a thin layer of "wallpaper" ("gevelbekleding") that's made of thin sides of real stone bricks. This way the houses look like regular brick houses, but are actually mostly made of wood. The brick-wallpaper means you don't need to paint all the time like in traditional wooden houses (eg in the Nordics), extra bonus. Personally I think it's a bit weird to build a house and fake the building material, but my only point is, you might have seen a lot more wooden houses than you knew!
> I never saw a house made a wood beside a ski chalet before
Maybe you need to get out more? In France (where I assume you live) new public buildings are mandated to be at least 50% wood or other bio-based renewables. Also ~5% (and increasing) of new domestic builds are timber framed.
I think this is sort of a more interesting question than the responses you got made it out to be.
Yes, of course, stone doesn’t really grow back on the timescales that we care about. Yes, stone not “bio” in any sense really.
But the goal of the law is not to make biology or geology points. It is to reduce the embodied carbon of new construction. I guess the determination was made that stone has some carbon cost… maybe it comes from the mining?
Or maybe they are trying to kickstart, specifically, a new industry in the field of growable construction material. Maybe they figure stone mining is already well developed tech anyway.
Isn't that just a matter of perspective? Most of the stone where I live is made of limestone which is from dead organisms. To the point that you can just break it open and find fossils throughout it.
That isn't renewable in the timeframe of humanity, but in the age of the universe it's renewable.
Good point, there are bio stones, but they are not renewable by our reference. But the vulcano stones are. And we have really lots of other stone underneath. No shortage of them. I would count them renewable.
Actually no. The situation that allowed that to happen, won't happen again in our biosphere. There are now microbes that break down decaying plant matter very quickly. So you won't ever get substantial amounts of oil being formed in the earth's crust.
I also took physical science courses in middle school. Just because new stones are formed within the earth's crust at some marginal rate does not mean that they are considered a renewable resource.
I think that's pretty neat but lava stone is a very particular type of stone with particular properties, suited for specific applications, where as the typical stone you will see in masonry and building materials is not renewable.
That's a non-sequitur. Stone is not considered a renewable resource, which is typically defined as a resource which naturally replenishes itself over time at a meaningful rate compared to the rate of consumption.
We have concrete buildings going back to Greek and Roman times, mostly standing.
Wooden buildings have a very finite lifespan, and, aside from earthquakes, much less so in a disaster. A wooden city and a steel/brick/concrete city react very differently to firebombing.
Especially with declining populations, it makes sense to build structures to last. The old school brick/concrete/stone/... European buildings from 1500 are largely in good shape, at least where they weren't demolished by war.
Traditional European construction is also much more friendly for heating / cooling. The thermal capacity of stone-based materials helps a lot.
To me, it feels a bit like Germany banning nuclear power plants, and switching to Russian fossil fuels instead...
What is "very finite" here? Where I grew up there are wood houses/barns/structures made entirely out of wood and still standing/being used after hundreds of years. Is that not enough?
Wood buildings can and have stood for hundreds of years, I'm in one right now. The ROI has been met after a few decades regardless of the material... at this point it becomes more economical to transport lighter materials that are easier to work with. Wood is also better for carbon storage as long as we're sourcing it sustainably. Concrete is one of the most carbon-intense materials out there.
Are you sure the facade isn't just stone, or do you use stone in interior walls? Most houses in NA are built of wood with a brick or stone facade. Some houses have a facade siding that can be anything from wood to cement board. Typically, the interior of the house is framed with wood or, in some cases, steel (mostly commercial).
The facade of a house or structure is usually tied into the framing so it doesn't fall over. Hence, brick ties are used to secure it to the wood or steel framing.
Yes, but if it's a much worse insulator, the extra heat transfer through studs might be more significant?
I'm not sure if it's been measured, but I imagine this densified wood would probably have at least twice the thermal conductivity of typical construction lumber, since naturally dense hardwoods already approach that.
So it seems like we'd basically need to replace 2x studs with 1x studs, assuming the same stud spacing, in order to match the thermal performance of a traditional wall.
I don't think this would be a dealbreaker at all though, one could always use continuous insulation instead of cavity insulation, which has a lot of benefits anyway. Maybe it can end up being a competitor to metal studs for commercial builds, at least.
In modern construction we already put continuous insulation outside the 2x4 so that we don't have to deal with the studs and how much worse insulation they are.
I think that's the best practice, also for avoiding condensation, but isn't it pretty uncommon at least for residential builds in the US? Here in Washington, codes were recently changed to require continuous insulation, but I believe that's only with the prescriptive method. From what I've seen most builders seem to continue working around it and doing cavity insulation only.
If this just replaces steel beams or allows more post frame construction, the walls wouldn't change. Actually, if used in post frame style construction, it would allow for more space for insulation with less thermal bridging.
Air has very low thermal conductivity, so for a lot of materials, thermal conductivity is primarily a function of how much air they contain and how it's structured (ideally in tiny pockets to minimize heat transfer through convection). Like spray foams, fiberglass insulation, etc are basically designed to hold air while minimizing convection.
I believe that's somewhat true of woods as well - different woods seem to range from 0.12-0.25 W/(mK) or so, which is somewhat less conductive than the underlying compounds like cellulose (0.4), thanks to the trapped air in wood.
It seems like densifying wood would mitigate the insulation contribution of trapped air, causing thermal conductivity to approache that of the underlying compounds like cellulose, though I'm not sure exactly what those compounds are with their process and how close they get to that air-free extreme.
if you dont make any other changes, it will have some detectable impact, but conductivity is linear with all of conductivity, depth, and area; and the other dimensions can also be changed like the screw diameter/pitch or the dimensions of the stud.
its very unlikely that this change will be an important consideration for house building or shopping though. theres simpler spots to reduce heat loss, like double paning your windows
My uncle built his home from hardwood. No insulation. In sub freezing temps, you can put your hand in the wood and it isn't cold. Compared to my (poorly) insulated home, it b is significantly better.
That isn't a good way to measure because the inside of the house is warming up the walls. Hardwood is a poor insulator, but it is an insulator. If you touch wood it will feel warm, but it still loses a lot of heat compared to a properly insulated wall.
"poor insulator", seems like an odd statement, but it's all relative I suppose. It's certainly better than the masonry or steel that this will replace. But if you take the air pockets out of it, then it's not going to be as good, but likely better than steel.
The real question for practical purposes is how much of these fine chemicals are actually consumed during the process and how much can be reused. The foul-smelling Kraft process has held on to its title in paper production because the chemicals it uses can be recycled within the plant itself. There are many better, less polluting ways to make paper, but they consume an impractical amount of chemicals which drives the price way out of economic usability.
This process will need to regenerate almost all of that sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite, or it's just peracetic paper again.
I wouldn't. The numerous miscarriages that my grandmother had while living in a mill town, and the cancer diagnoses that followed family who worked at the mill taught me to stay upstream of mill towns.
There is a great deal of prior art in aviation and automotive engineering for densified wood, which have all proven to be non competitive with metal.
Lighter, stronger, but not quickly adaptable to new designs or refinements.....the molds are large, complex, heavy, and expensive.
And a simple no go for beams is that they(wood) burns and steel does not, will instantly remove them(wood) from bieng used in most building codes past a certain hight, where minimum times for evacuation durring a fire can not be met.
I was under the impression that mass timber buildings were actually safer for fires because it takes a very long time to burn through, and unlike steel they won't lose their strength in an intense fire.
what maters is time to escape befor "total involvement", or confaguration, steel contributes nothing to a fire, fire cant climb or follow it, and it acts as a heat sink, vs wood, which is fuel.
All of the historical mass casualty fire storms, involved wooden structure, and steel, concrete,glass, and brick, ended that.
Add in modern fire suppresion and fighting equipment and the current situation is quite secure vs/vs fire.
edit, another factor is comunication and road infrastructure, where the recent fire storm in California, destroyed many many wooden structures, but the loss of life was exceptionaly low compared to other firestorms in less developed countrys.
woods great, love the stuff, have a lot of wood, live in a wooden house and heat with wood, but there is essentialy no way that can be done with
a thousand people in a huge building, so steel, which I also love and work with.
Everything in it's place.
> All of the historical mass casualty fire storms, involved wooden structure, and steel, concrete,glass, and brick, ended that.
You're right insofar as lots of improvements have been made to steel-and-concrete building fire safety since the 1970s. Plastics are sometimes still a problem.
"total involvement", or confaguration, is what matters true. However fires are more complex than that. Generally the wood frame isn't a source of fuel for the fire until later. The carpet and other furniture that is the same in all builds is likely to burn first. Not long after the wood frame is burning the steel frame absorbs enough heat to fail - but either way you really want to be out long before it gets that bad (and probably are dead if you are not)
If that is the case, then I don't see any novelty here. This has been done for a long time. In Germany, this is called "Panzerholz" (something like "bulletproof wood")
Modern Panzerholz (Kunstharzpressholz, 'synthetic resin densified wood') is manufactured with resin - this new material doesn't seem to rely on resin, but only on the cellulose contained in the wood.
Same reason we don't build bridges out of titanium: panzerholz is more expensive than normal wood, and normal wood is good enough for most applications where it's used.
Titanium's strength is in its weight: steel's Young modulus is almost twice as high, so you'd have to build rather large bridges to compensate. Titanium is useful where weight is a concern, like things you launch into space. Steel is perfect whenever weight isn't a concern and sometimes still works really well because you get so much strength out of so little which is why there are so many fans of the thin, shock absorbing, steel bike frames.
Titanium's advantage is imo not so much its weight, as aluminium is better still in that respect. Titanium is mostly better where corrosion and temperature resistance are important. Relative to weight, high grade steel, titanium and aluminium are about equal in tensile strength.
Those steel bike frames don't have much in common with the steel used for structural steel. They both are iron alloys with added carbon content, the similarity stops there.
Similarly trying to compare "titanium" to "steel" is dumb. No one uses pure titanium for structural purposes & there are hundreds of common steel alloys.
Please stop repeating this FUD. The notion that a rigid steel frame provides measurable shock absorbtion over the supple, air-filled, rubber tires is mind numbingly stupid.
As you can see from Figure 3a at the top of the third page of the paper, this densified wood is about ten times the stiffness of natural wood, in the sense of Young's modulus. Stiffness is basically the product of Young's modulus and geometry, not geometry alone.
There was a inventor in Germany which got featured in a science show on television, which did something similar. He build a big pressure cooker where he placed the wood and a liquid mixture inside and let it cook for many hours. The wood got soak through completely, which gave it, as he claimed, resistance against rotting at every layer. For outdoor appliances the wood would not need any coating and not deteriorate.
There was no mention about the hardness, but he also didn’t press it.
InventWood's research paper mentions not just boiling, but boiling it with an "aqueous mixture of NaOH and Na2SO3", which also helps with "partial removal of lignin and hemicellulose".
Steel, itself, is a material with a wide range of properties. In terms of tensile strength, which is the simplest kind of strength to measure, steel ranges from mild steel at 400 N/mm^2 to piano wire alloys at about 2500 N/mm^2. "Stronger than steel" is a flashy appellation that usually means you have just reached the bottom end.
A similar phenomenon occurs sometimes in papers about ceramics research. A very tough ceramic will often see a comparison of its fracture toughness to that of aluminium; as you've guessed, this usually refers to the toughness of pure unalloyed aluminium.
Liangbing Hu at UMD, checks out. Fantastic find! This should at least be the top comment on this thread to offset the content-free journalist pablum that's linked.
The strength is 483–587 MPa, I seem to see when skimming, which is indeed superior to ASTM A36 structural steel (250MPa yield strength). In Extended Data Figure 1c, they reported the density as 1.3g/cc, a sixth of the density of steel. (Extended data figure 2f plots density against lignin removal percentage.) Of course high-strength steels are stronger, but not six times stronger.
As for the process, they didn't just boil the wood; they boiled it with lye (2.5M, the "food industry chemical") and sodium sulfite (0.4M, technically also a food industry chemical, used for example as an antioxidant in wine) for 7 hours before densifying it with 5MPa for "about a day", removing optimally 45% of the lignin. This is similar to the sulfite chemical wood pulping process that preceded the Kraft paper process, just carried out at high pH and not taken to completion, so in a sense I guess the result is sort of like Masonite, which is also made from cellulose fibers from wood bonded with the wood's natural lignin.
Environmental concerns may be an obstacle; sulfite pulping is nasty. Also presumably to mass-produce the stuff they'll want to find ways to shorten the cycle time, and maybe already have.
The burning question that arises in my mind is why nobody was doing this in 01890, 135 years ago. Sulfite pulping was going gangbusters, building materials were booming, environmental concerns were largely unknown, and there was a rage for everything newfangled, modern, and "scientific". The scientific discipline of strength of materials, needed to calculate the benefits, was already well developed. Mason put Masonite into mass production in 01929, with a process involving autoclaving wood chips at 2800kPa. So what prevented someone from selling Superwood back then? Did nobody try partial alkaline sulfite pulping and pressing the result?
> The burning question that arises in my mind is why nobody was doing this in 01890, 135 years ago
> Mason put Masonite into mass production in 01929
Thank you for taking into consideration that for us readers, 1890 was 135 years ago. Just so you know, people from this era haven't started writing 4-digit years with the leading zero yet.
> established in 1996 ... The Long Now Foundation hopes to "creatively foster responsibility" in the framework of the next 10,000 years. In a manner somewhat similar to the Holocene calendar, the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem[2] (e.g., by writing the current year "02025" rather than "2025"). The organization's logo is X, a capital X with an overline, a representation of 10,000 in Roman numerals.
error: invalid digit "8" in octal constant
error: invalid digit "9" in octal constant
But why only one leading zero? You can show you care somewhat more about the future by writing 002025, but then someone comes along and writes 000002025 ...
I appreciate that people have started to think about this already, but could I propose an alternative system. Borrowed from Warhammer 40k The Long Now was founded in 998.M1.
It's a little jarring at first, but that would easily get us to the 999th Mellenium and wouldn't be too hard to reference BCE dates as 005.M-0
Part of the strength is from Cellulose Nanocrystals (CNCs), which are modern (mid-01900's) and still being heavily researched. I was just at a conference where people were presenting work on making CNCs (and lots of other biomass conversion) more sustainable: H2O2 instead of SO4, greener versions of DMF like Cyrene, etc
My daughter recently started researching extracting/converting CNCs from fabric blends (currently cotton/elastane like spandex). Reading this post made me wonder if we can then remake fabric from CNCs, strong against knives or bullets?
> I was just at a conference where people were presenting work on making CNCs (and lots of other biomass conversion) more sustainable: H2O2 instead of SO4, greener versions of DMF like Cyrene, etc
This all sounds very interesting if you have any links!
The conference was International Symposium on Green Chemistry [1], here's a previous HN comment I made [2], and here's a quick Dropbox-dump of my non-personal pics from there [3].
Many of the slides aren't available yet, but I'll try to curate some from photos. I'll put photo number from Dropbox, since they make direct-linking hard.
Photo 62 to 67 shows the H2O2 work from Mark Andrews' lab at McGill, being commercialized by a company called Anomera.
Photo 8 and 9 has a Cyrene whitepaper from Merck/Sigma-Aldrich. They did have presentations about it, but I don't have notes, will try to get from my daughter as she wants to try it for her process.
Photo 16 has a revisualized Periodic table of elements, logarithmically scaled by availability and color-coded with scarcity / conflict / need. We only have 100 years of Indium left and that was sorta worthless >20 years ago and now used in every touchscreen. had photo but put source link instead [4]
Photo 2 shows that we are now man-making stuff at a greater rate than the earth is creating stuff and that is rapidly increasing. The point there was that we will keep doing this, so we need to make it sustainable and circular. Photo 5 shows how FUBAR'd we are.
Happy to try to answer other questions, but noting I'm not a chemist but a chaperone, so I'll have to ask other people.
Apparently it's not just me who thinks when someone says "food processing chemicals" that "hey, lye is food processing chemical too" - used to industrially peel mandarins. Weaselwording to make things sound benign.
There are problems we absolutely should be thinking ahead 8000 years to solve for (or help mitigate)– climate change, species protections, sustainability, etc.
Call me skeptical, but reformatting dates for a "bug" in 8000 years seems extraordinarily silly. To think humanity will likely be using the same time measurement systems, computers that operate remotely similarly to ours today, same written/spoken languages, etc is laughable.
8000 years ago, the entire world's human population was roughly equal to that of London today and still just figuring out agriculture.
Even in passing comments in the 'year of the clock' 02025 to some forum? So the idea is that the computing systems in the YotC 12025 parsing hackernews from a 10000 years prior would experience a "bug" when encountring 4 digit dates?
You know, back in 01999 we were sticking representation of dates into these bit sized 'registers'. Certainly hope by the time we hit 10000 CE "long term thinking" has made significant inroards in the field of information processing ..
I see. a brief google search didn't bring up anything in relation to the leading zero concept, but that helps. at a brief glance, their use of the leading zero seems like ... clever marketing?
my analysis of it is that it's a way of making people wonder "oh why is he writing it like that?" like I did, lead them to the foundation, and have them engage with it and be aware of it in the future; i.e. marketing. it's quite clearly not a practical thing. the probability that by the time 10000AD rolls around we're still using the same year system, we're still alive as a species, we're still technologically capable as a species, and we don't have the capacity to understand older years minus the leading zero seems near enough zero to be zero. call it what you like, marketing, inspiration, whatever, but it's a sneaky way of leading people's thoughts onto a particular pathway, which I call marketing
to be clear, having read through their website, I think what they're doing is great, and this isn't a criticism
I was born in the 20th century. I was filling out a medical form and put my birth year in with 2 digits. The web app took that to mean just the 2 digits. No, I wasn't born in AD 70.
That's the kind of programming that makes you reluctant to put anything into it.
Not using leading zeros seems fine if you're using AD near it to indicate that it's not 1942.
The antibacterial properties of penicillin had been discovered many times before it was eventually realized what a big deal it was in 1940 (Howard Florey's role is much more important than Flemings' for that reason).
So it's entirely possible that the process was found, and discarded straight away because they didn't realize how cool their invention was.
That's one possibility. Another is that it has a critical drawback; Masonite siding resulted in a massive class-action lawsuit verdict due to moisture damage (though the researchers say Superwood is less vulnerable) and it occurs to me that maybe structural steel's plastic deformation when overloaded as a construction material is somewhat more forgiving than the brittle fracture behavior typical of wood and evident in the photos of their ballistic testing.
That it has a fatal flaw is indeed a possibility, but I don't think it could be the reason why it hasn't been invented sooner: if anything, we are detecting these kinds of flaws way faster than we used to, so it's likely that in the past it would have been produced at scale long before we found the problem, and given that consumer laws were nonexistent back then, it could have been kept on the market long after the flaw had been found, as long as it is economical enough to produce.
Total layman but I assumed that lignin was the molecule that was actually making the wood hard ? How does removing it improves hardness ? Why is there an optimal amount ?
As for the reason it wasn't my wild guess would be that they were already mining for coal so it may have been more economical to just dig the ground with quasi-slaves rather than having more competition on the wood resource and waiting for it to boil whereas you can just produce steel bar by the kilometer in a factory.
I'd argue that it is to the point insofar as the price of labor is important to the competitiveness of a finished product, isn't it so ?
I think your response stems from the fear of me trying to turn this into something "political" but it seems to me that going down the mine has been really hard work and low pay for most of History. I am pretty sure that most historians would agree that mining is one of the easiest use of slave labor (go down the mine and bring back the stuff failing which you will be punished, also no skills required) from the point of view of slave owner/manager that is. I am also sure they would agree that after the abolition of slavery, you could consider a big chunk of mine workers, quasi slaves. Hell, even today, mining is one of the main use for drug-addicted labor force in Myanmar and child labor in Congo.
Our ancestors in the 1800s worked under conditions we find atrocious, because that was the best work they could get. Not because they were some kind of slaves.
By 2025 standards, the 1890s were a time of extreme poverty, low technology, and medical ignorance. Life was short and hard, but also much better than a century earlier.
In a century, people will hopefully say the same about our time.
It was only the best work they could get because they had been forced out of the countryside by cost increases, automation, and centralization of land ownership. They teach about the enclosure of the fields in schools for a reason: what had once been communal property of villages throughout England became the exclusive property of the nobility. By and large, if people had a choice they preferred to remain a peasant: you lived in the countryside, breathed clean air, stayed close to the friends, family, and community you were raised with, were self-sufficient, had space and time to raise a family, worked on your own schedule (at least day-to-day), didn't have to let some 'boss' treat you like a slave, didn't have to fear being 'fired', so on and so forth.
To quote an economist (Branko Milanovic) who's done work on this topic in the context of 19th century Serbia attempting to industrialize their peasant population:
> All contemporary evidence points to the fact that peasants were not at all keen to move to cities and work for a wage. Since there was no landlessness very few people were pushed by poverty to look for city jobs. Political parties which strongly (and understandably) represented peasantry further limited mobility of labor by guaranteeing homestead (3.5 ha of land, house, cattle, and the implements) which could not be alienated, neither in the case of default on a loan nor in the case of overdue taxes.
> This situation was very typical for the late industrializers in South-East Europe. Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia were all overwhelmingly agricultural with small peasant landholdings and no landlessness. All displayed slow or arrested capitalist development and half-hearted urbanization. The reason was simple: farmers had no incentive to move from being self-employed to being hired labor. And who would prefer to switch from being one’s own boss and dependent perhaps only on the elements to become a hired hand, working six days a week all year round, in “satanic mills”?
> ...
> The question is, how do you industrialize under such conditions? Reluctance of peasants, whenever they had their own land, to become industrial workers has been discussed (Gerschenkron, Polanyi). In England they had to be literally chased from land through enclosures; in France, the process was much more overdrawn and took a century; in Germany, Poland and Hungary, large estates owned by nobility and consequent landlessness did the job. In Russia, it was bloody and occurred through forced collectivization.
> ...
> The process whereby agricultural economies industrialized was wrenching. The displacement and unhappiness of the population dragged into industrial centers through either empty stomachs or outright terror was incomparable in its human costs to today’s similar transfer of labor from manufacturing to services (or to unemployment). The transformation in the underlying economic structure is never easy but it seems to me that the one from the fresh air and freedom of own farm to being a cog in a huge soiled machine of industrialization was the most painful.
Being "forced out of" work by automation is how we have progressed during the last 250 years of the Industrial Revolution. It continues today.
Fewer people can produce as much food as before, so the people not needed for food production can start producing other things.
This can of course be a tragedy for the people left without work, but for society at a macro level it is hugely beneficial.
This era in England has a bad reputation, and by our standards it was awful, but by objective measures like average lifespan, population size and technological progress, it was a time of unprecedented progress and material improvement for common people.
Did people lose a sense of community as they left their ancestral villages. Probably, and I don't know how to weigh that against our immense wealth today.
> Removing some lignin allows you to compact the wood more.
Yes, lignin puffs up the wood, when some of it is removed by boiling and then heated up and pressed at the same time, carbon molecules bond with each other exponentially more.
I was researching this subject two - three years back. Anything that needs to be able to move at some point, benefits a lot by being 6 times lighter. Also buildings are always constrained by their weight when trying to make them as tall as possible.
Labor is a necessary component of the finished goods. Therefore its source, cost, availability, and "externalities" relative to competing formulations is indeed relevant.
in Finland they seem to have a similar method, where they bake the wood (they don't press it), the wood is then stable against rot and pests. please note: don't experiment with your oven at home, it will be unusable afterwards (because of the evaporating resins)
MDF includes some binders, but is essentially this. Doubt the glue-free version would stick together well, but maybe.
The sawdust planks wouldn't have the properties of the long-grain wood fiber planks though. The fibers that make up natural wood are what makes the wood tough.
This is kind of how plywood is made - take wood chips and glue and press them together. I feel it wouldn't work well with sawdust, even with the chemical and heat+pressure process, since there would be little natural cohesion between the particles (larger pieces = more strength, up until you have entire logs/boards).
Large chips glued together is Oriented Strand Board (OSB). Small chips glued together is Particle Board. Sawdust glued together is Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF). Plywood is layers of veneer--thin sheets of wood--glued together in alternating orientations.
Plywood can be nice. It doesn't expand with temperature changes like planks and doesn't have a grain direction that it can split along.
The others, I hate. Any small amount of moisture and they delaminate. OSB is so ugly and rough that you need to hide it because you'll never be able to apply enough primer to cover the chip pattern. I'd rather just use regular plywood at that point. Particle board is the same, but I'm okay with the kind coated on both sides with melamine. It's pretty hard to get a much flatter surface than melamine particle board without spending ridiculously more on granite.
But MDF is the worst. A lot of people like MDF because it's easy to work and can be fairly structural, if you use it right. But it's very, very easy to damage, has absolutely zero edge strength, and it makes a super-fine, extremely carcinogenic sawdust that is extremely difficult to clean up completely. Yes, all sawdust is carcinogenic, always wear a mask in the wood shop, but MDF sawdust never goes away.
Frankly, it's just easier to get a bunch of sheets of birch plywood and southern pine dimensional lumber shipped direct to my house and not worry about it.
probably not. This does not work by adding a binder, like a plastic. This process softens the wood and then compresses it. I'm not sure that doing that with sawdust would give you enough tensile strength.
That seems to really only provide benefits in use cases where weight isn't an issue, since this is conceptually just taking out air and adding more wood into the same amount of space to increase strength.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but almost all use cases for wood rely on it to be somewhat light, for which the lattice structure is already fairly ideal.
No, density is doubled, but strength is increased 11×, according to the paper. Sandwich panels with strong, stiff face sheets will always beat relatively homogeneous material like natural wood for the kinds of applications you are talking about.
Oh interesting, then it laminating thin sheets of this should be far lighter for the same strength, I didn't expect the strength increase to be anywhere near 2x much less 11x.
I've seen this video, he did a pretty good job, but his chemical treatment didn't penetrate at all. I suspect he would have benefitted from pressure cooker during that step. this is how treated lumber is treated to get full penetration of whatever chemicals they use.
given the depth the of the penetration, he basically case hardened it. you can see in the bullet tests that the interior laminations are much fatter than the exterior layers.
It's a good video. He based his work on / followed the protocol described in the Nature paper published by the lab mentioned in the article (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476).
I keep hoping to see advancements in lab grown wood beyond what was reported a few years ago. My dream is enormous sheets of plywood with many layers of fibers all with ideal orientations, grown at sea on barges, taking up growing nutrients and e.g. fire retardant minerals from sea water. The barges would cross the equator seasonally to maximize sunlight.
I'm skeptical that the soil in a lumber forest will remain viable for growing trees indefinitely. Crop rotation and fallow is necessary for sustained growth of other crops, it's probably necessary for trees too, just on a larger timescale.
Crop rotation is needed for yearly crops that deplete soil. By harvesting them, you’re removing the nutrients.
As I understand it, you’re not taking any significant amount of nutrients when you harvest the trunks of trees and leave the branches behind to replenish the soil.
Controlled burning can also be used to speed up the process. Some species of pine trees actually require fire to reproduce.
There are questions about making the soil more acidic. Pine trees grow better in acidic soil. Correlation is not necessarily causation.
Lignin is C31H34O11, all stuff that the tree can get from air and water, so you've got a point there.
But a tree trunk is more than just lignin. Also it could be more complex than whether you're robbing the soil of nitrogen and phosphorous. There's a lot we don't know about the role of soil microbiota, for instance. I don't have any evidence that it's going to be a problem, but nobody has evidence that it's not going to be a problem either (only that it hasn't yet).
Although I guess this is all orthogonal to whether, once you've harvested the wood by whatever means, you process it into something stronger and denser.
As someone else mentioned, pine trees aren't a great material. But apart from that, giant monoculture forests are not excellent. Old growth forests host a degree of biodiversity and ecological function that tree farms generally don't.
Lab / barge-cultured wood products could potentially have really great materials properties that the natural stuff doesn't. Plywood is super useful stuff, and the best is made from more layers. The orientation of the wood fibers is flipped 90 degrees from layer to layer to give its strength in multiple dimensions. The more perfectly uniform the grain of each layer, the better quality the plywood. Voids and grain runouts create a locally weak spot or cosmetic issues. Weak spots generally don't correspond through layers, and the material generally isn't pushed to its theoretical limits in application. And cosmetically, better quality plywood reserves the highest quality layers for the outermost visible layers.
Baltic birch plywood is considered The Good Stuff and is made by essentially peeling a tree that grows pretty straight and pretty uniform. But you can imagine growing a seamless sheet of plywood that is even more perfect. Maybe one or two layers of fibers running one direction, before the next layer is encouraged to flip orientation. The platonic ideal of plywood, without needing to peel trees and stick layers together with glue.
And again, if we get freaky with the cell cultures, you can imagine cool properties where layers take up minerals from sea water that help with e.g. rot resistance or fire resistance. Or even freakier, maybe we figure out how to incorporate synthetic or lab cultured spider silk with our plywood, giving it truly novel material properties.
There's a big dynamic range in pine. For example, I work with everything from big-box-store lowest-cost pine lumber (2x4s) to kiln-dried select pine.
The low quality stuff is full of knots, warped (with very high variable humidity- some beams weigh 2x other beams). The high quality stuff is.... not as nice as maple, but certainly it's dense, uniform, and doesn't warp. From what I can tell, it's because they select the high quality stuff, then kiln-dry it and mill it.
Also if you inspect cheap 2x4s, there are often some higher quality pieces (few knots, straight-ish, not too wet) which you can then trim and plane to get decent wood.
But yeah, pine is sort of an industrial product grown fast at scale.
Pine is well suited to its use, otherwise, well, we wouldn't use it!
It's by a massive margin, the most common lumber used in construction. Its strength and other properties are well understood and all you have to do is follow the specifications and it performs great.
I mean what would even be the advantage to using other woods for home construction? Using a "stronger" wood means what? You can make your structural members smaller than 2x4? What would be the point? Walls need space for insulation and wires and pipes, there's no good reason to use a more dense wood. And it would still be more expensive! Pine is perfect for what it does because it meets the practical and engineering needs at the least expensive price.
Computers. We put a lot of work into keeping certain data scarce and that's at odds with the nature of a computer, which is much better at making copies than preventing them.
Woodworking. Tables, chairs, etc. You typically a want a hardwood for these crafts. However, it you're going to make cheap stuff that won't last... pine is fine.
This is a common misconception usually spouted off by “elite” (aka beginning) woodworkers. Pine (white pine in particular) is a great material for woodworking. Much cheaper and more forgiving than harder species, takes stain well, and looks incredible when properly finished. If you think it won’t last, go look at pretty much any barn built over 100 years ago in the eastern US that is still standing. More often than not you’ll find thousands of board feet of old growth white pine inside. Similarly, many heirloom pieces from the same region and period are pine. They used what they had.
The problem is that you can't get old growth pine, you can only get construction grade pine anymore.
I've been woodworking for decades and would never use it for furniture. It moves way too much with the seasons (fine for barns where you can build large expansion joints, but not for my chair), and it doesn't take stain well unless you take additional steps to prepare it beforehand.
Also many/most barns used whatever wood they had available. In my area the insides are mostly cottonwood and the outside is oak.
That's not an argument to use pine. It's an argument to use whatever you have at hand.
Lots of modern construction is well behind the times. Eg most new residential buildings in England are still brick instead of wood stick framing and insulation. At least they adopted cavities! But houses in England are correspondingly cold and damp and cost a fortune to heat up. If only they imported more pine!
A lot of people seem to think my statement is a tautology, but it's not.
It's exactly my point that not every material is good for its use. Even ones used in the overwhelming majority of cases -- like leaded gasoline. The ensuing environmental disaster shows it was exactly the wrong choice of material to solve the problem.
True, although I’m not sure I understand the comparison. Are there negative externalities to pine framing that other types of wood wouldn’t have? Or is the concern with wood framing in general, as opposed to some other kind of building system?
Anyone can comment on this? Just reading this article, and not bothered by any relevant knowledge here, I'm scared that they're turning "harmless" wood into some sort of super product that is hard to break down later for recycling? Like how we did a nice job switching from Styrofoam to paper cups, except they now have a plastic liner that makes the paper hard or impossible to recycle? Or how I wonder what the city recycling is going to do with those "wooden" kitchen cabinets that I dropped off, that are completely covered in a plastic finish?
Cross Laminated Timber (CLT), which I assume this is closely related to, is being used in construction more often now. It's much lighter and stronger than steel, easier to work with, holds up well in a fire because it doesn't go soft and loses structural integrity like steel does. And while wood of course can be burned, the char layer that forms on the outside protects the inside so it actually has some safety properties that buy people time when there is a fire. Also, wood is an excellent insulator.
Laminated timber is also very construction-friendly. It can be worked with simple tools, and CNC machines allow for prefab components to be shipped to the site and assembled quickly with minimal fuss.
There are some plans for high rise construction with this material. E.g. there is a plan for a skyscraper in Tokyo (350 meters, 70 floors).
The adhesives used in laminated timber aren’t perfect. They’re very durable, which is great for structural integrity. But it also means the material breaks down more slowly in a landfill (if you decide not to recycle the material for some reason). However, newer adhesives used for this these days are less toxic and not that harmful in a landfill. And importantly, most of the material is actually just wood, not glue.
CLT is in no way similar to the product InventWood is working on, besides that it uses the same base material, and I guess requiring some pressing. You can think of CLT as being like plywood, but for beams instead of for sheets.
That said, CLT has 2 major advantages over regular wood:
1. It is more dimensionally stable, it expands/contracts less and in a more uniform way.
2. It is cheaper at larger dimensions. I.e. 0.5m x 0.5m x 20m wooden beams would take decades to grow and even then not realiably, but you can just manufacture CLT beams with those dimensions easily out of <10yr old trees.
Those two advantages are not limiting factors for the construction of cars or airplanes, so CLT is not super relevant to them.
Early cars and planes were made out of wood. So, I see no reason why not. The mosquitto which was one of the most successful planes in WW II was made out of plywood, which you could think of as an early form of CLT.
A lot of modern cars are made with a lot of composite materials that probably have better properties. But I imagine CLT could work well for things that are currently made out of steel or aluminium on such cars. I'm not sure if there's a big advantage to doing that in terms of strength, weight, or durability though. Aluminium might be lighter. And composite materials provide better strength and weight.
If you follow the link from the article [1], then there's an abstract that describes the process. It sounds like they boil the wood with sodium hydroxide and sodium sulphite, then heat and compress the wood, which somehow leads to better alignment (and/or linking?) of the cellulose polymers.
I don't know what the implications are for recyclability, but there's no mention of injecting other materials so perhaps it decomposes in a similar way to ordinary wood?
Depends a bit on the country and era of the sleepers ('ties' in US), but traditional wooden sleepers are treated with creosote [0], which is tar/oil impregnation.
I'm no expert on this subject by any means, but I happen to volunteer at a museum where we have steam trains running. We build our tracks to look traditional, so we use wooden sleepers and no ballast. Most of our sleepers are donated from the commercial railroad companies, typically they are old stock but we also receive used ones occasionally. In my part of the world wooden sleepers aren't common anymore, so it's getting harder to find usable ones. This is a concern for us, as apaearantly there aren't any suppliers left in our part of the world for new ones. At our museum they typically last for about 15 years, mainly because we place our sleepers directly on the soil (no balast). The tar/oils will eventually dry out and the wood will just rot/decompose naturally. Wooden sleepers are considered chemical waste in my part of the world, though I do believe we are allowed to let them decompose fully as biomatter, which goes quite quick if in contact with moist soil. Though we typically dispose our used sleepers at a specialized waste facility, I'm not sure how they process it there.
Oh, and in case you are wondering: no, they don't burn, so we can't use them as firewoord for our steam engines ;-)
Appearantly in the USA, at least as of 2008, around 90% of all track was still using wood [1]. I didn't expect that. For most of the world we have used concrete sleepers for a long time already. Plastic sleepers are also common nowadays, which are typically made from recycled materials.
> Appearantly in the USA, at least as of 2008, around 90% of all track was still using wood [1]. I didn't expect that. For most of the world we have used concrete sleepers for a long time already. Plastic sleepers are also common nowadays, which are typically made from recycled materials.
This is for a few reasons, but the two primary ones are that wood is very cheap and plentiful in the US compared to most of the rest of the world, and we haven't banned creosote in the US like most of the rest of the world, so creosote treated wood is still the most common type of railroad tie.
You'd think that there'd be a robust secondary market for treated rot resistant timber that's "too rotten for trains, but perfect for landscaping". Sure, there's chemicals in it but if it's safe enough to be embedded in untold miles of rail bed then surely it's safe enough for comparable landscaping use.
Like everything else there's probably some 2nd/3rd order consequence of regulatory perversion that prevents it. Like because of the circumstances it wrongly gets classified as hazmat or something.
creosote railroad ties are commonly found in landscaping around here. unfortunately, they are hazardous waste, thusly getting rid of them is a bit of a hassle.
I know you "can" buy them but I've never seen them for sale in my state or surrounding ones save the occasional classified posting. Perhaps you can buy them in parts of the country with different regulatory priorities.
That's true, at least around here [Germany]. Plus the nasty stuff might leak into the environment over the decades, and it's a pain to dispose of.
IIUC, they replace them with plastics since the plastic is seemingly more ecologically friendly and easier to recycle.
Mind concrete sleepers are what's used these days. You'll find wood only in shunting or cargo yards. (Or museums. Or the US - see linked commen by LeonM).
Source: I randomly met someone involved with that project. A proper train enthusiast can probably elaborate here, but I think I remember the core idea correctly. Also this obviously doesn't necessarily hold globally, though I can imagine many track operators face similar challenges.
Not sure the point is to recycle it but rather to have a more carbon friendly alternative to steel. It would also have the benefit of making us less reliant on steel in places where wood supply is ample.
I suppose if it doesn't decompose that makes it a decent option for Carbon sequestration. That might actually be better in a strange way than if it did break down.
“your choice of energy input” is carrying a lot of weight in your statement. producing steel from iron ore is extremely energy intensive. it’s true that once produced, recycling steel is less expensive.
but steel doesn’t store carbon (except the small carbon input used to turn iron to steel)
actually recycling steel is not 100% lossless in that everytime you decrease purity which leads to a point where the still can only be used in low grade products. building materials is usually one of the low tiers though.
Iron ore is contaminated with all sorts of crap, far worse than scrap steel. If what you are saying were true, it would be impossible to make high-grade steel from iron ore.
It does require a reducing gas such as the CO produced by coke, but an electric arc furnace can of course reach higher temperatures. Iron can be smelted successfully from ore even without a high enough temperature to melt it, as in bloomery smelts, but the quality of the resulting metal is quite uneven.
then again we have hundreds of years of economies of scale in place for that process, and (presumably) far less for repurifying steel. I'm not saying it's not possible, of course it's not, but is it financially viable with current infrastructure? I'm genuinely asking, I don't know anything about this.
The article cites them on the carbon impact, as if to say it's an environmentally more-sustainable option. And the reduced carbon impact is great, but I'm sure it's not the only factor to consider in the overall sustainability and my attention was drawn to the ability to recycle, since we (not you, but certainly _me_) are being lulled into thinking that it's "just wood".
Call me cynical but I expect that if it's anywhere as good as the promoters claim competing industries will lobby and astroturf until whatever glues they're using get neutered or rendered economically much less viable on an environmental basis or they'll find some niche performance area where it's worse and get the building code written in a way to use this deficiency to make it much less frequently usable and it'll be 20yr of that incrementally getting rolled back it actually gets used it in any volume.
Where in that video do you see the injection of resin mentioned? I didn't immediately see that step from skipping through, and it's not mentioned in the abstract of the paper.
Yeah, just watched that very entertaining video and there is no resin in that bulletproof wood - it's just had all the lignin squeezed out and cooked under pressure.
This is not the first article I have read about it. Throughout all of them, though, one main question I still could not find an answer to is: stronger than which steel? HSLA, carbon, rebar?
Other than that, I'm all for it. We're renovating our house currently and made some structural changes. Would've loved to exchange some load-bearing steel beams with wooden ones so we could even leave them exposed as a design element.
Not only do we need to ask which steel, we also need to ask which strength. Off the top I my head, if were thinking about contructing buildings, then I'd want to know:
I'm also interested in how long it retains those properties. Steel can rust, but some alloys the rust protects the rest, while others it will rust away. Salt is also a factor in rust (important near the ocean). Wood often rots in water.
They claim the fire properties are good, but I don't know enough about fire to know if they tested all the important properties.
Sure, but only if you choose a steel with a low tensile strength. There are common steels with between 200 and 2000 MPa tensile strength, whereas I understand this wood material has about 500 MPa.
This is (imho) impressive, and much better than untreated wood, but I think it's misleading to say "stronger than steel" when that labels a huge range of materials.
Absolutely, its unfortunately just a matter of cost. To get an equally sized wood beam that could support the weight, its almost 5x the price. Even factoring in other materials and labour.
CLT is not inherently more expensive and the cost difference is typically less dramatic. Steel just has a few centuries of a head start on learning curves, economies of scale, etc. Scaling up usage of CLT would bring down cost just like it has with steel.
The biggest issue actually is that there's a lot of resistance in the construction industry that is simply locked into using steel and concrete and more or less blind to the advantages of wood. Switching materials would mean new tools, new skills, etc. are needed. I have a friend who is active in Germany pushing the use of this material and he talks a lot with companies in this space.
Companies seem to default to doing what they've been doing for a long time without considering alternatives. Many construction projects are actually still one-off projects that don't leverage economies of scale or learnings from previous construction projects. Construction could be a lot cheaper and much less labor intensive than it is today.
CLT could actually make on-site assembly a lot simpler and faster than it is today. Ship pre-fab components created in large scale facilities optimized to manufacture those cost effectively. Assemble on site using simple tools and processes.
I don't work in the industry, but from my admittedly very consumer-oriented perspective that wanted to build a house for a while:
The reason why economics of scale never really made sense in this context was that shipping the prefab components to the building site mostly wiped out the savings.
Ignoring the actual shipping cost (which is substantial for heavy things that get assembled into a house), it also comes with the risk of things getting damaged while en-route etc. another reason is the fact that places in reality very rarely are actually the same. They can do best effort, but things will likely still vary a little. That's another error scenario wiping out a good chunk of the savings, which fundamentally doesn't exist of you just build on-site.
I'm not knowledgeable on this new material to judge wherever this could potentially change this status-quo, but I wouldn't hold my breath either.
I think the concerns you raise aren't actually show stoppers for a lot of prefab housing that has been happening for decades.
Wood is a lot lighter than steel and concrete. And that has to be transported as well. So you'd have less cost there, not more. About 50% weight savings. That's a lot of diesel.
As for parts getting damaged. That's what insurance an warranty are for. I don't think that's a show stopper issue.
And there are advantages to producing prefab components in a facility that is optimal for that and climate controlled that has all the right tools, specialists, equipment etc. Also, pooring concrete in the winter is problematic. Water freezes. And it expands when it does so. Working with steel is a PITA when it freezes as well. It conducts heat very well. Construction sites aren't very active in the winter in those places that have them for this reason. Prefab wood components don't have a lot of these issues. You can still work wood when it freezes. And bang in some nails. Or drill holes.
It isn't a show stopper, but it is why site built it competitive with prefab unless (as is all too common) prefab cuts corners. Prefab because it needs to ship on current roads often has size limitations of the modules that limit how you can arrange your house.
It’s not just construction company resistance to change.
The regulatory landscape around home building is intense. Especially for fire code. You basically have an entire industry of inspectors whose job is to fail things that don’t match any known pattern, so getting new patterns established is quite difficult.
There is likely also some resistance to it in the home insurance space where they are incredibly data driven, so until you have data built up to justify the statistically supported lower prices of stone houses, the insurance companies will keep premiums higher resulting in non standard materials being limited to the wealthy or fanatics willing to eat the cost.
Yes, the Glulam alternative tends to be a bit more expensive for some applications, but I am surprised that it is 5x more expensive than the steel solution. The reference I have (in Europe at least) is that the cost of Glulam is currently about 350 €/m³. Steel is quite more expensive, but of course, the profiles are slender, so less material is used.
Stronger than steel... I guess you won't be nailing it, I guess you'd have to prefab parts so you could drill through with like a carbide endmill since, unlike steel, you can't just use a magnetic drill like you would for field drilling holes.
Im willing to bet steel drill bits in a hand drill will still drill through it, it will just take longer like if you were drilling a notoriously hard wood like hickory. In practice you might need to actually go with smaller pilot holes and work up to bigger bit, rather than the average contractor method of jamming a half inch drill bit directly into some pine and forcing it through. But its not like anyone who regularly drills holes doesn't know that denser or harder materials need to be drilled with progressively increasing drill bit sizes.
On second thought, while that makes it less practical for western construction, this material would be extremely suitable for Japanese framing methods.
They actually use mostly chisels, but my point is that every cut in every structural member is done custom by hand at the warehouse in advance. i.e. where tooling is most flexible
Take ipe for example. It's janka hardness is around 3600, which is >< double what most consider a hardwood. It drills fine, with some caveats:
1. It's very dense
2. The first hole is usually easy enough, but consecutive holes become more and more difficult.
3. This is much less a factor of density than of silica content. Silica sands the metal. Carbide and cobalt bits can help a lot, but the silica always wins.
Worthy note: High silica wood dust, eg from ipe, may as well be considered worse than asbestos. It's evil stuff and will destroy your tools and your lungs inevitably.
Edit: while I don't know the silica content of a wood that's roughly twice the (janka) hardness of ipe, such woods also seem to drill ok, depending on the bit. Two examples are Lignum Vitae and Quebracho. The latter, I think, means axe breaker and was named appropriately.
Edit 2: it's Day of the Insidious and Relentless Typo. Nailing any of the mentioned woods is about as practical as nailing your own hammer. Either the nail will bend before making a dent, or the wood will split.
For all those who are peeved by "stronger than steel" claims: No it's not. Or only in an extremely specific, not very practically relevant way. Their Nature paper [1] has the details, but let me summarize:
Tensile strength along the fiber direction is up to 600 MPa, which is higher than mild steel used for ordinary construction (~400 MPa). Except that mild steel is isotropic and highly ductile, i.e. it will deform by 50% or so before finally breaking, while the densified wood will snap as soon as its strength is exceeded. There are also steel grades that are way, way stronger than mild construction steel.
Flexural and compressive strength is up to half as high (300 MPa, below mild steel).
Strength in the weakest direction (across fibers) is around 50 MPa, or 1/8 of mild steel.
This densified wood is essentially a rather weak fiber composite. With careful planning it can be used instead of steel in construction, but their marketing is simply BS.
From a quick read, this appears to be referring to the same process as was used by NileRed in their video about making bulletproof wood (https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM). It should be interesting to tool around with when it hits store shelves.
That video was my first thought when I heard about this a few days ago. I always wondered how it was possible to make wood this strong yet it seemingly had no use cases. Maybe it's finally about to find some real world use cases.
What’s the limit on how much wood we can produce? I hear people say using wood is good for carbon capture, but trees take a lot of time to grow, no? If we started using 2x to 10x the amount of wood as we did before, wouldn’t we deplete our stock of trees?
I work in the industry and forsee the drawback being the price and the market. To buy any kind of "engineered" wood the most cost-effective options will be parallel strand lumber followed by glue-laminated lumber.
This product is going to be extremely expensive and will not complete with existing engineered woods.
I suspect the issue with the other use-cases you mentioned is that it's very rigid. It isn't at all ductile or bendable the way steel is. It would either need to be pressed directly into the shape you need during manufacturing or pressed into a large piece of raw stock then subtractively processed to get the shape you need.
Pressing might be economic for standard profiles like beams but it won't be for pieces like the chassis of a car.
To be clear, "pressing" here doesn't just mean a standard hydraulic press, the press also needs to be heated and the wood needs to be held under pressure for a while. You can't just stamp it the way you can with steel panels.
Could you imagine how nice it would be to have the wood pressed into a single panel like like the tesla gigapress. I realise that it would have its drawbacks, but that wood paneling would look sublime.
Wood actually has some properties that make it desirable in a fire: the charring creates a natural barrier and it doesn't melt meaning it holds structural integrity. This makes it very desirable for building construction, but for cars it means it can act as a fire barrier potentially, and save lives.
Those can't be made with beaMs. Must invert concepts and switch a consonant. Suggested course of action is to genetically engineer a tree that directly makes itself of this super-strong wood and grows all the way up there. Tree must come from beaNs.
Maybe limitations wrt the shapes it can easily take on? One of steel’s advantages in vehicles is its plasticity. Whereas construction mostly just requires materials that are flat and straight.
Yup, and there are also limitations on joining. Steel and wood are joined in very different ways with different physical properties of their joints and different spatial profiles for joints as well. You can’t weld wood.
I don't know much about materials science, but I had a few classes about it.
Seems like their wood gets ~550 MPa in ultimate strength in tension. Seems like their material is brittle (so it behaves like a spring until it breaks), therefore you probably want a safety margin, because at 550 MPa it breaks. Note the unit is a Force/Area, you can compare materials with the same cross-section. In compression they say it's about 160 MPa in axial load, it can be more or less in the other directions (due to wood having fiber it's not the same in all directions, and there they compress it perpendicular to the fiber so they get one direction stronger than the axial load and one weaker, but I guess for a beam you mostly care about axial strength).
Torsion and flexion are directly dependent on compression, shear and tension, didn't find shear. Although I'm not entirely sure how it works for materials that aren't the same in all three directions like steel.
For steel, depends on the steel but a quick search (https://www.steelconstruction.info/Steel_material_properties and https://eurocodeapplied.com/design/en1993/steel-design-prope...) says ~200 to 400 MPa in tension for yield, at which point it starts changing shape instead of behaving like a spring, then 350 to 550 MPa for strength, at which point it breaks. I believe in multiple applications they do go apply forces where the metal bends a bit and adapts to its application, but I'm not sure. Regardless, that would mean the wood in tension is equivalent to very strong (presumably very expensive) steel.
In compression, steel is from 170 to 370 MPa apparently(https://blog.redguard.com/compressive-strength-of-steel, didn't find much else easily because numbers were strange on other sources), so I guess steel would win on that one.
But this is comparing the raw strength. In reinforced concrete, you add the metal for tension resistance, concrete is there to sustain compression, so it wouldn't matter much. For beams, the shape of beams is optimised to resist in the direction it needs (e.g. the H cross-section resists to bending in one direction). But you probably can't do that with their wood (they say for now they are limited in shapes), so you'd need more material, and probably it would be stronger overall since you have more material. Question then is how much material (in weight, compared to steel) do you need (they say 10 times less but it probably doesn't take into account the shape), and how much does it cost?
I'm guessing they could also make composite beams at some points too, with not only wood in them.
Then for mechanical applications, there might be also other things that enter the game. In their paper they needed to coat the wood so it wouldn't swell with humidity. For any application with friction, not great. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more sensitive to friction than metals.
Note that the numbers are from 2018, they may have improved the process.
Aren't the solvents pretty nasty chemicals? I wonder how they deal with the sodium hydroxide + sodium sulfate saturated with lignin and hemicellulose... maybe it can be turned into a soap or glue? That sounds like a rough biproduct to have to deal with.
I guess those aren't as nasty as I thought, lye and sodium sulfate are pretty innocuous.
It's probably much less difficult to deal with than plastic byproducts.
As it is now, wood pulp and waste products are recycled into plywood and wood composites by binding them with glues and resins. This process allows us to take the wood pulp and produce wood beams and boards without using the glues and resins. With the added benefit that it's even stronger than existing wood composites.
If I understand correctly this process enables recycling wood pulp and waste with less inputs and less environment impact.
I wonder if it could be used to make machine tools. The wood grain structure that remains should be inhomogeneous enough to dampen vibration, and the treatment should make it dimensionally stable, so that it might be better than cast-iron for machine beds, frames, etc.
It's possible that this could replace 1950s and 1960s US made cast iron as the best possible material for large machine tools. (Lathes, mills, jig borers, etc.)
This is cool. On the other hand, maybe somebody could build a tracker for these technological announcements and things that come out after a few years. Batteries are another fascinating one.
I saw a tip once to do a Google News search on it, add a saved search and let Google email you if anything new comes up. Make sure to use good keywords so you don't get false positive hits on the subject.
> On the other hand, maybe somebody could build a tracker for these technological announcements and things that come out after a few years.
I've sort of had the opposite idea in my head for a while (many years): I wish there were a site that only talks about stuff that's already released and available to consumers. I don't want any future promises, I don't want any pre-orders, I don't want any announcements for products that will only come out in months to years, not even supposed scientific advancements that haven't even resulted in any product yet and may never[0]. I want only stuff that's available right now already.
Hearing about future stuff has only ever made me feel worse. I want to just stop hearing about the future altogether. I wish promises and pre-announcements and whatever just didn't exist.
Are they touting how pretty it looks because it won’t hold stain or varnish well afterwards? What kind of paint and primer would you use? A lot of how a coating performs depends on the structure of the material. If it’s rot, uv and insect resistant that would be a benefit here too.
I wonder if the alternative to wood is just... wood.
Anecdotal, but I've been to Finnland last year and I couldn't help but see a correlation between (a) big swaths of land are covered in trees and (b) a lot of housing is build with wood.
It's honestly somewhat impressive to see huge structural elements build from what is basically a single glue-up.
So I assume that it's not actually about "wood stronger than steel", but more about (local) availability and/or logistics.
When I lived on a farm in wales, we would occasionally discover in our fields something called bog oak. This was trunks of oak placed in the ground by ancient farmers to drain a field. Over the centuries this had become semi-fossilized and in the process had become very strong. From high quality bog oak, it is possible to make wooden rings as strong as metal. Our bog oak was not so good (I tried) but certainly good enough for super strong dowels and suchlike.
I think the only real problem is compressing wood this way is not fast and you end up spending near as much or more on this compressed wood than you would on many other materials. I still think it has uses but this isn't some new miraculous tech that's going to take over everything and replace stuff like steel which is pretty damn cheap. Wood in its natural form already has some of the highest strength-to-weight ratios compared to non-exotic materials, but it does still has drawbacks.
I am curious how much grain structure effects compressed wood's strength, because with traditional wood you have to either very carefully select your pieces and avoid knots in bad areas, or just super over-build a structure so that no single points are ever a failure point. Like a stud-framed house can use garbage wood because it really only needs like 1/3 of the studs to be a stable structure, the other 2/3rds are just convenience for nailing things to it and in being able to use crappy lumber without any skill or knowledge and still end up with a safe and stable structure. Versus something like a timber frame where there are critical beams holding things up that you don't want a big gnarly knot in the middle of a span.
Thankfully, lumber has developed not-imprecise grading methods that are tied into guaranteed load values that are tied into architectural plans (which themselves include safety margins).
My local forestery product association already claims that per unit of weight, wood is stronger than steel. We are seeing taller and taller high rises going up with mass timber.
The idea here holds merit and has been attempted before. The video below is a great watch about "bulletproof wood".
This company however is using it for the facade of the building not the structure, which is kind of a yellow flag. Many fancy headquarter buildings are after some novelty to show off. Facade is not a reliable market unless they can somehow integrate their wood into curtain wall systems and other high wind load applications.
Ipe (Brazilian Walnut or Ironwood) has excellent resistance to penetration for standard lead rounds. It's super-dense and fire resistant. The process for InventWood seems like it is re-creating something similar.
Ipe is actually not attractive for exterior structures. The wood is so dense, stains don't penetrate. Many let it age to a grey/brown patina with annual cleaning and sanding. Inventwood would be a better alternative for exterior work if they have coloring options during the manufacturing process. For Ipe, staining is expensive and time consuming due to it has to be stained like cabinetry, with two passes.
I assume that their first product is for facades because it was easier to get an approval for it? But eventually they want to expand into structural elements too.
IMO, they should be going after the hardwood flooring market. LVP, engineered hardwood and laminate are all OK, but you could sell this as real wood that is just as durable as LVP. Especially given some of the samples look like teak, ipe, walnut etc, and those species make beautiful but expensive floors.
No pricing mentioned though, perhaps it is too expensive.
Yes, the pricing is what I'm curious about. If they were saying "we can make this for half the price of steel," then the world steel market becomes their growth target.
If they can't get cheaper than steel, if they can't compete with steel, they'll probably never be more than a niche product.
You can make a product that is resistant to indentation and scratches while still providing give under your foot. LVP achieves this with various underlayments, the same technique could be used here.
At least for residential, wood-framed houses, the framing material is delivered pre-cut. Even roofing beams are pre-assembled and delivered in triangles to the construction site.
I'm sure someone can figure out a program that takes a CAD design and plans all the cuts.
>Ultimately, InventWood is planning to use wood chips to create structural beams of any dimension that won’t need finishing. “Imagine your I-beams look like this,” Lau said, holding up a sample of Superwood. “They’re beautiful, like walnut, ipe. These are the natural colors. We haven’t stained any of this.”
CLT is often faster because you can essentially just prefab it offsite and assemble it significantly faster and with less equipment and specialized workers than reinforced concrete. Steel needs steelworkers, plus concrete takes time to set and cannot be poured in all weather conditions.
While this isn't CLT I would imagine you still get most of the benefits (you can cut it to spec offsite and don't have to do anything special with it when it shows up)
Does it rely on glues, epoxies, or other chemical processes?
It's kind of moot if the resulting product causes more emissions or is not reusable, bio-degradable or at the very least chemically inert, like steel is (citation needed).
If all of that isn't true, it's just aesthetics.
(most of what I know about this is from a video about making bamboo 'wood' products, which involves a lot of glue)
Does anyone know if extensive genetic editing for construction wood optimization has been tried? Some planted forests have no food chain role whatsoever (like Eucalyptus in Brazil) so this seems super safe high reward endeavor.
> The densified wood demonstrates a record high tensile strength of 587 MPa.
Yeah... ok it's 50% stronger than very low strength steel.
I think there are other problems comparing it with steel. Steel isotropic; wood is only strong in one direction. Steel has really nice and safe ductile failure modes that wood doesn't. Iron mining is not great for the environment but I doubt hardwood production is either, and steel can be easily recycled.
Seems like a great product but it feels like slightly disingenuous positioning.
For high load applications, steel is already cheaper than wood, so to compete with steel, not only would this new fancy technology have to be stronger, but also cheaper.
That's probably why they are leaning in towards sustainability and aesthetics instead. They likely can't compete on cost.
The process sketch in the linked article is soak wood in some unspecified chemicals for a while then compress it (claimed by a factor of 4). Wood is ~400/500 kg/m3 so taken at face value I guess that gives ~1800kg/m3. Pretty much where carbon fibre falls. I'd expect it to be done at elevated temperature too.
I think I'd expect that to work. It's not going to be better than steel, as steel is amazing for a wide range of reasons, but for something in the domain of marine ply / other engineered timber, sure.
I dated a girl who did this as a science project in high school a decade ago. This has been around for decades. Does anyone know why it is not actually used?
Interesting, they mention that it's more carbon-efficient than steel and concrete, but they don't give an estimate of the energy required to produce such material?
The process involves boiling and pressing, both pretty energy-dense processes. Maybe not as energy intensive as an arc furnace, but would be curious to know how much less.
One of my first jobs (~1999) was as a research assistant working on seeing whether it's possible to make reentry vehicle heat shields from oak. Sadly, it wasn't.
I'd be curious about the total carbon emissions, all in, to produce this because it seems like an excellent carbon sink. And especially when compared to steel.
Is there any statement on the resistance of this treated wood to dry rot? It's cool that it's stronger, but if I were say building a house out of this stuff, I would want to know if it's more difficult for fungus to break it down.
Wild guess but I'd imaging it's probably quite resistant to many forms of rot and decay. There's no molecular space left for anything to work it's way in, to intrude.
> Ultimately, InventWood is planning to use wood chips to create structural beams of any dimension that won’t need finishing. “Imagine your I-beams look like this,” Lau said, holding up a sample of Superwood. “They’re beautiful, like walnut, ipe. These are the natural colors. We haven’t stained any of this.”
Show the [beep]ing picture!
This is so spot on. The fact that there isn't a single image showing an ACTUAL comparison, even of small samples, is a massive red flag for a company that is advocating the "aesthetic" properties of it's product.
Then, even worse, they RELY ENTIRELY ON UNLABELED AI GENERATED IMAGES.
I cannot imagine a better way to say "there's a high chance everything we've promised is fake news". Just make sure to squint before looking at our ad copy!
This is a relaunch. Here's their launch video from May 2024.[1] The video has some CG of a piece of their wood, plus stock shots of trees, cities, wind turbines, people looking through microscopes, etc.
U. of Maryland announced this specific process back in 2018.[2] They got a paper into Nature.[3]
Densified wood is over a century old. [4] You can buy something called "Lignostone".[5] But that is a material where they took the lignin out and put some plastic in. (Remember "transparent wood" from a few years ago. Same concept, with a transparent plastic.) This new process takes the lignin out and compresses the cell structure.
If you could send in $20 and get a little cube of the stuff to look at and test, this would be more convincing.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiHABi97rU8
[2] https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/new-densified-wood-...
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476
[4] https://jwoodscience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s1008...
[5] https://www.roechling.com/us/industrial/lignostone
This video is what you're looking for:
https://youtu.be/96Dz-rQtGxI
Here's someone from the InventWood team talking about the product, uses, future, and more at a trade show.
They show a hands-on demo of the wood product and give an animation of the process.
The talk is pretty illuminating. They think this will even be used in the automotive sector in places where carbon fiber is currently utilized.
This is way better than the press coverage and actual website.
Thanks for the link! As pessimistic as I am toward this company it sounds like something that could be quite neat if it actually exists.
However, I lost all hope (of the little I had) after their sales rep said they "densify" their wood. My dude, if you need to spin so hard you pull out a thesaurus for "compress" it's not a great look.
Because they don't just compress their wood! That's the step after putting it in a vacuum and baking it and heating it up so that the lignin depolymerizes. The video does a great job of explaining how this is different from just sticking wood into a press.
Densify is a word: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=define%3A+densify&ia=web
> However, I lost all hope (of the little I had) after their sales rep said they "densify" their wood.
You lost hope because they used an industry standard term?
Sure did. You're right it seems to be in use widely (in the wood compression industry), not that it seems to have any distinction from compression... (I say from my uninformed perspective)
E.g. it feels along the lines of "we didn't just heat it, we THERMO-MODIFIED (tm) it." No matter they mean the same thing, doesn't the second one just sound cooler?!? /s
Same ilk as "deconstructed" food, "artisanal" crafts, "synergy", ...
cooked and warm are of course, indistinguishable.
in a mechanical sense, a compressed object goes back to normal when the stress is removed, unless you break it. if the work piece did not go back to its original shape, you arent just conpressing anymore. eg. you are likely "cold working" it instead.
if youre applying heat, you might be "forging" or "casting" while applying that compressive force.
theyre all quite distinct
You’re sure eager to judge considering how much knowledge you lack on the subject.
I definitely am negatively biased toward anything I perceive using buzz words or jargon. I doubt I'm the only person with this knee jerk reaction (I say without any statistics or evidence I can link in).
Same with any product that is over or deceptively advertised.
If their stuff was good, provably so, then they'd prove it on their own merits. They wouldn't need to fill a website with 99% AI slop if they had anything else of any substance.
Or, it's definitely possible I'm in the % of people who is overly sensitive to bullshit, and I fall outside the target audience of their AI slop. Similarly to how spam emails include typos to filter out people who are actually paying attention.
> I definitely am negatively biased toward anything I perceive using buzz words or jargon.
Unfortunately every profession with any depth of knowledge will have jargon. Even house staff at a restaurant will talk about 2-tops and 4-tops, etc. It's just jargon, or better yet, convenient abstraction to describe the problem space these people live and breath.
This is an extreme overreaction to usage of a regular word that literally describes what they are doing. "Compress" would have been less accurate.
Say what you will about the website but the video is a pretty reasonable sales demo.
The picture at the top of the article appears representative of the surface appearance: https://www.inventwood.com/superwood-beams
I know it's practically cliche to say so these days, but that picture is giving strong AI vibes. Look at the joints between the big beams. If you needed beams that large to hold up a building, you wouldn't cut them in the middle like that. And you wouldn't have those gaps.
Plus, all the text on the page is future tense, talking about what the super wood beams will be able to do.
So I don't know how much that picture really represents what the wood will look like.
I'm almost positive it's AI generated. Look at the chairs at the kitchen island in the background. No human would draw chairs that look like that.
The picture at https://www.inventwood.com/superwood-facade also looks AI-generated.
The fact that they're using AI images on their landing pages does not give me confidence in the quality of the product.
What is going on with the window reflections (for superwood-facade)? It doesn't look right.
What about this one? https://www.inventwood.com/superwood-beams
There are lots of posts from them on the internet image search...and it seems they've gone to a number of industry conferences with samples. I agree, that from a PR perspective, their pictures are too polished. They should show a piece in a less polished format.
At this point I'd say I have <5% confidence any image on their site is of an actual sample as opposed to a 3d render, or worse, AI slop.
Edit: Even the photos of wood on a truck is obviously AI garbage when you zoom in: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67160715a896dc...
wow that image is pretty bad; all sorts of weird inconsistencies in the wood stack that scream AI; I'm ignoring the license gibberish as that could be just removal of identifying info.
What about this: https://www.newhometrendsinstitute.com/consumer-insights/ind...
the image is low resolution, but appears to be from an actual trade show, and an image not from the company.
Oh it's 100% AI generated. Look at the back brown leather chair to the right. It's supposed to have a blanket on it, but instead it's a garbled mess
Yeah, inspecting the picture closely there are at least 20 to 30 things that immediately stand out as "AI did this". There are so many things wrong with those chairs on the right. The wood support beams are just not right, nobody would build like this.
There’s also an image a bit down the page:
https://www.inventwood.com/technology
But I’m not sure if it a real photo or some sort of… analogy? Under “INTRODUCING SUPERWOOD: THE NEXT GENERATION OF BUILDING MATERIALS,” we can see one piece that looks like an actual piece of wood, and then some other ones that looks like an artificial wood-looking finish wrapped around some core which visually looks metallic (but which, I assume, is actually their engineered wood).
I dunno. I guess “being wood” is more about the ecological impact in this case. If it is replacing steel and it looks ugly, well, a lot of steel looks ugly and then gets covered up.
That really looks like it's AI generated. Not a good look for a company claiming to make something!
That's an AI generated image
They didn't even bother to AI-upscale it to get rid of the artifacts
Yes the final product will preserve the wood grain in some form. The paper has a few images of the final product. They basically boil out all the non-cellulose and compress what remains into a smaller form. I assume the strength is that a super board of the same size would be made of several boards' worth of wood fibers. I haven't read enough yet, but I wonder if this substantially lowers weight / strength. Right now, steel is required for tall buildings because there is an upper limit to how high you can go before wood buckles. There are no 300 m trees after all.
fwiw, I first thought this was going to be some innovation in glue, which allows manufacturers to turn wood chips and sawdust into MDF, OSB, and particle board. These are typically weaker than sawyered beams of the same size because the glue is not as strong as the cellulose fibers that run the length of a beam. (However, they are getting applied more and more in the construction in the US because it is crazy expensive to find a tree that can produce thick enough 40 ft beams, but you can easily get enough sawdust to make an even thicker, precut MDF board.) But I thought no shot, because if you can make glue that is stronger than cellulose, then why bother with the wood?
wasn't this a picture:
https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/SUPERWOOD-...
Someone posted what's probably the study it's based on below, it looks to be Figure 2d and 10e. As suggested, it's just darkened in a nice looking way (without stain) which frankly doesn't seem like it's necessarily a good thing.
https://www.fpl.fs.usda.gov/documnts/pdf2018/fpl_2018_song00...
This seems to be the research behind it: https://www.fpl.fs.usda.gov/documnts/pdf2018/fpl_2018_song00...
And there are only smaller comparisons towards steel. They are more focused on how it compares to regular wood.
In summary, what they are doing: 1. Boil the wood. 2. Press the wood. 3. Done.
This seems to be the original research paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 [edit: whoops, it's the same paper]
"First, natural wood blocks were immersed in a boiling aqueous solution of mixed 2.5 M NaOH and 0.4 M Na2SO3 for 7 h, followed by immersion in boiling deionized water several times to remove the chemicals. Next, the wood blocks were pressed at 100 °C under a pressure of about 5 MPa for about 1 day to obtain the densified wood"
Pretty simple and straightforward.
I wonder if this can help offset the weakness of new growth wood - trees and wood specifically designed for fast growth and quick turn around.
https://brenthull.com/article/old-growth-wood
I wonder if it would work for bamboo.
My thoughts as well. I was holding a board the other day and it just seemed, forgive me, aerosol-ized. Like those Aero chocolates that are essentially full of bubbles. "This new wood doesn't feel like wood used to" and shook my fist at the passing cloud.
I have high hopes for this product as a leg of sustainability.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CglNRNrMFGM
Here's a NileRed video replicating the process.
Ok that was super cool to see. I can see how clearly the process described in the paper has plenty of room for improvement
So what size will a 2x4 be after that? 0.75x1.25 just doesn’t roll off the tongue, does it?
In seriousness, nominal vs actual sizing is just terrible. Do places outside of North America do this too?
It's true that dimensions are all screwy, evidently due to variable shrinkage during drying in the old days. The mills control for it now, but meanwhile everyone got used to the weird sizes and we're stuck with them because everyone centered on the shrunk sizes for tooling and standards. Pros know but it's a pain for DIYers.
https://www.inchcalculator.com/actual-size-of-dimensional-lu...
> It's true that dimensions are all screwy, evidently due to variable shrinkage during drying in the old days.
That's just an old wives tale.
Lumber shrinks for money reasons, older lumber is bigger [1] with sequential revisions to the standard decreasing it's real size [2] [3] (the difference between 2in and 15/8in in strength is minimal however you can keep doing that math, and they did, to go down from 2in to 1.5in over a century).
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/vv9atu/t...
[2]: https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/dashboard/searchResults/titleDeta...
[3]: https://www.synthmind.com/miscpub_6409.pdf
Lumber shrinks, but not that much. There was NO standard and so mills just did what felt they could get away with calling a 2x4. Some mills did 2x4 was 2"x4", some did other sizes, it depending on how much they felt they could cheat vs how much they felt advertising the larger size would help. I have seen houses built in 1880 that used modern dimensions for 2x4s.
> In seriousness, nominal vs actual sizing is just terrible. Do places outside of North America do this too?
I understand the origins of this. But I've never understood why we haven't moved on to actual sizing given the scale at which standardized lumber dimensions are produced
I'm just glad there is a standard. It doesn't matter much what size it is. What matters is that I can go to any lumber yard/mill when I need more and get it. What matters is that I and my inspector can look at (or more likely memorize!) some charts and be sure that everything is strong enough. Is actually 2"x4" lumber stronger than the standard sizes - yes, but most of the time it doesn't matter, and if it does I really want to step up to 2x6 (or something) because margin of safety is important when you get that close)
Definitely done in Ireland and the UK anyway.
[flagged]
Here in NL stone is the traditional building material too, so it's not uncommon to see houses built of wood, but covered in a thin layer of "wallpaper" ("gevelbekleding") that's made of thin sides of real stone bricks. This way the houses look like regular brick houses, but are actually mostly made of wood. The brick-wallpaper means you don't need to paint all the time like in traditional wooden houses (eg in the Nordics), extra bonus. Personally I think it's a bit weird to build a house and fake the building material, but my only point is, you might have seen a lot more wooden houses than you knew!
BC, most residential building up to a couple stories high are made with mostly lumber I would say.
> I never saw a house made a wood beside a ski chalet before
Maybe you need to get out more? In France (where I assume you live) new public buildings are mandated to be at least 50% wood or other bio-based renewables. Also ~5% (and increasing) of new domestic builds are timber framed.
Is stone not a bio based renewable?
(Concrete isn't, but plain old stone? Or bricks?)
I think this is sort of a more interesting question than the responses you got made it out to be.
Yes, of course, stone doesn’t really grow back on the timescales that we care about. Yes, stone not “bio” in any sense really.
But the goal of the law is not to make biology or geology points. It is to reduce the embodied carbon of new construction. I guess the determination was made that stone has some carbon cost… maybe it comes from the mining?
Or maybe they are trying to kickstart, specifically, a new industry in the field of growable construction material. Maybe they figure stone mining is already well developed tech anyway.
Stone is just minerals. There's no organic (bio) component in stone at all.
Likewise, there's nothing renewable about stone. Our primary source is digging it out of the ground.
Isn't that just a matter of perspective? Most of the stone where I live is made of limestone which is from dead organisms. To the point that you can just break it open and find fossils throughout it.
That isn't renewable in the timeframe of humanity, but in the age of the universe it's renewable.
Good point, there are bio stones, but they are not renewable by our reference. But the vulcano stones are. And we have really lots of other stone underneath. No shortage of them. I would count them renewable.
If you are counting that as renewable then crude oil could be seen as renewable, too. ;)
Actually no. The situation that allowed that to happen, won't happen again in our biosphere. There are now microbes that break down decaying plant matter very quickly. So you won't ever get substantial amounts of oil being formed in the earth's crust.
Where are we growing new stones?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortar_(masonry)
You can recycle them. And raw stones are not a rare thing and they do get formed new constantly inside the earth.
I also took physical science courses in middle school. Just because new stones are formed within the earth's crust at some marginal rate does not mean that they are considered a renewable resource.
Have you every watched a vulcano spit out lava?
I wouldn't call that marginal. And vulcanoes are just the visible part of that process happening everywhere in the crust.
Iceland architects trying it out next to volcanoes, funnel the molten stuff into building material mounds of some kind
I think that's pretty neat but lava stone is a very particular type of stone with particular properties, suited for specific applications, where as the typical stone you will see in masonry and building materials is not renewable.
If we run out of stone, we have lots of other problems.
That's a non-sequitur. Stone is not considered a renewable resource, which is typically defined as a resource which naturally replenishes itself over time at a meaningful rate compared to the rate of consumption.
Do we really consume more stone, than gets relenished? Is that a assumption or well studied topic?
... where the mantle meets the crust?
Why? That seems dumb.
We have concrete buildings going back to Greek and Roman times, mostly standing.
Wooden buildings have a very finite lifespan, and, aside from earthquakes, much less so in a disaster. A wooden city and a steel/brick/concrete city react very differently to firebombing.
Especially with declining populations, it makes sense to build structures to last. The old school brick/concrete/stone/... European buildings from 1500 are largely in good shape, at least where they weren't demolished by war.
Traditional European construction is also much more friendly for heating / cooling. The thermal capacity of stone-based materials helps a lot.
To me, it feels a bit like Germany banning nuclear power plants, and switching to Russian fossil fuels instead...
What do you mean by "Traditional European construction"? In much of central and northern Europe almost all construction is traditionally wood.
>In much of central and northern Europe almost all construction is traditionally wood.
That is woke bs and you know it. If it ain't 100% roman concrete, it ain't right.
Only barbarians with beards use wood.
Im not sure what you mean by "woke bs" as it is evidentially factual. Most of central and northern Europe wasn't even a part of the roman empire...
> Wooden buildings have a very finite lifespan
What is "very finite" here? Where I grew up there are wood houses/barns/structures made entirely out of wood and still standing/being used after hundreds of years. Is that not enough?
Wood buildings can and have stood for hundreds of years, I'm in one right now. The ROI has been met after a few decades regardless of the material... at this point it becomes more economical to transport lighter materials that are easier to work with. Wood is also better for carbon storage as long as we're sourcing it sustainably. Concrete is one of the most carbon-intense materials out there.
they use wood to build houses in the mountains because they already used all the stones to build the mountain
Are you sure the facade isn't just stone, or do you use stone in interior walls? Most houses in NA are built of wood with a brick or stone facade. Some houses have a facade siding that can be anything from wood to cement board. Typically, the interior of the house is framed with wood or, in some cases, steel (mostly commercial).
The facade of a house or structure is usually tied into the framing so it doesn't fall over. Hence, brick ties are used to secure it to the wood or steel framing.
So I guess boiling and pressing will get rid of the trapped air inside wood and it won't work very well as an insulator?
Wood is already a poor insulator, so if it takes up less space and you can fit more insulation, that is better.
Yes, but if it's a much worse insulator, the extra heat transfer through studs might be more significant?
I'm not sure if it's been measured, but I imagine this densified wood would probably have at least twice the thermal conductivity of typical construction lumber, since naturally dense hardwoods already approach that.
So it seems like we'd basically need to replace 2x studs with 1x studs, assuming the same stud spacing, in order to match the thermal performance of a traditional wall.
I don't think this would be a dealbreaker at all though, one could always use continuous insulation instead of cavity insulation, which has a lot of benefits anyway. Maybe it can end up being a competitor to metal studs for commercial builds, at least.
In modern construction we already put continuous insulation outside the 2x4 so that we don't have to deal with the studs and how much worse insulation they are.
I think that's the best practice, also for avoiding condensation, but isn't it pretty uncommon at least for residential builds in the US? Here in Washington, codes were recently changed to require continuous insulation, but I believe that's only with the prescriptive method. From what I've seen most builders seem to continue working around it and doing cavity insulation only.
Depends on where you live, but that seems to be fairly common anyway in new builds.
If this just replaces steel beams or allows more post frame construction, the walls wouldn't change. Actually, if used in post frame style construction, it would allow for more space for insulation with less thermal bridging.
Not a materials guy but would densified wood lead to such a drastic increase in thermal conductivity?
Air has very low thermal conductivity, so for a lot of materials, thermal conductivity is primarily a function of how much air they contain and how it's structured (ideally in tiny pockets to minimize heat transfer through convection). Like spray foams, fiberglass insulation, etc are basically designed to hold air while minimizing convection.
I believe that's somewhat true of woods as well - different woods seem to range from 0.12-0.25 W/(mK) or so, which is somewhat less conductive than the underlying compounds like cellulose (0.4), thanks to the trapped air in wood.
It seems like densifying wood would mitigate the insulation contribution of trapped air, causing thermal conductivity to approache that of the underlying compounds like cellulose, though I'm not sure exactly what those compounds are with their process and how close they get to that air-free extreme.
if you dont make any other changes, it will have some detectable impact, but conductivity is linear with all of conductivity, depth, and area; and the other dimensions can also be changed like the screw diameter/pitch or the dimensions of the stud.
its very unlikely that this change will be an important consideration for house building or shopping though. theres simpler spots to reduce heat loss, like double paning your windows
My uncle built his home from hardwood. No insulation. In sub freezing temps, you can put your hand in the wood and it isn't cold. Compared to my (poorly) insulated home, it b is significantly better.
That isn't a good way to measure because the inside of the house is warming up the walls. Hardwood is a poor insulator, but it is an insulator. If you touch wood it will feel warm, but it still loses a lot of heat compared to a properly insulated wall.
Are the walls solid hardwood? Is it a cabin? How thick are the walls?
Hearing this reminds me of the Dara O' Briain line that American houses seem to have been built by the first two little pigs.
"poor insulator", seems like an odd statement, but it's all relative I suppose. It's certainly better than the masonry or steel that this will replace. But if you take the air pockets out of it, then it's not going to be as good, but likely better than steel.
You probably only use this wood for the frame, or spread through the rest of the wooden structures like rebar?
Wood used in framing has a small r value because of the air. The timber on the exterior prevents all the energy transfer.
The loss of r value can be off set with two 2x4 frames. As strong as a 2x6 wall and about the same price. Added benefit is air gaps.
Probably not. But it eliminates a lot of what makes wood flammable.
I wonder how it impacts the effects of humidity and time to make wood warp.
Sounds like a great candidate for decking.
The real question for practical purposes is how much of these fine chemicals are actually consumed during the process and how much can be reused. The foul-smelling Kraft process has held on to its title in paper production because the chemicals it uses can be recycled within the plant itself. There are many better, less polluting ways to make paper, but they consume an impractical amount of chemicals which drives the price way out of economic usability.
This process will need to regenerate almost all of that sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite, or it's just peracetic paper again.
I'd rather live next to a leaky paper plant than a teflon plant any day.
I wouldn't. The numerous miscarriages that my grandmother had while living in a mill town, and the cancer diagnoses that followed family who worked at the mill taught me to stay upstream of mill towns.
Absolutely not. Paper mills are fucking nightmares.
Visit Int'l Falls, MN. They have a paper mill and then there's another one on the other side of the river in Canada. It's foul
I think it's clear that you're not familiar with how often paper mills have poisoned the nearby populations.
I'd rather live next to neither. Paper plants stink.
There is a great deal of prior art in aviation and automotive engineering for densified wood, which have all proven to be non competitive with metal. Lighter, stronger, but not quickly adaptable to new designs or refinements.....the molds are large, complex, heavy, and expensive. And a simple no go for beams is that they(wood) burns and steel does not, will instantly remove them(wood) from bieng used in most building codes past a certain hight, where minimum times for evacuation durring a fire can not be met.
I was under the impression that mass timber buildings were actually safer for fires because it takes a very long time to burn through, and unlike steel they won't lose their strength in an intense fire.
what maters is time to escape befor "total involvement", or confaguration, steel contributes nothing to a fire, fire cant climb or follow it, and it acts as a heat sink, vs wood, which is fuel. All of the historical mass casualty fire storms, involved wooden structure, and steel, concrete,glass, and brick, ended that. Add in modern fire suppresion and fighting equipment and the current situation is quite secure vs/vs fire. edit, another factor is comunication and road infrastructure, where the recent fire storm in California, destroyed many many wooden structures, but the loss of life was exceptionaly low compared to other firestorms in less developed countrys. woods great, love the stuff, have a lot of wood, live in a wooden house and heat with wood, but there is essentialy no way that can be done with a thousand people in a huge building, so steel, which I also love and work with. Everything in it's place.
> All of the historical mass casualty fire storms, involved wooden structure, and steel, concrete,glass, and brick, ended that.
You're right insofar as lots of improvements have been made to steel-and-concrete building fire safety since the 1970s. Plastics are sometimes still a problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire
https://nfsa.org/2023/08/22/understanding-combustible-materi...
"total involvement", or confaguration, is what matters true. However fires are more complex than that. Generally the wood frame isn't a source of fuel for the fire until later. The carpet and other furniture that is the same in all builds is likely to burn first. Not long after the wood frame is burning the steel frame absorbs enough heat to fail - but either way you really want to be out long before it gets that bad (and probably are dead if you are not)
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If that is the case, then I don't see any novelty here. This has been done for a long time. In Germany, this is called "Panzerholz" (something like "bulletproof wood")
Modern Panzerholz (Kunstharzpressholz, 'synthetic resin densified wood') is manufactured with resin - this new material doesn't seem to rely on resin, but only on the cellulose contained in the wood.
Yes, but Panzerholz is plywood. They seem to be doing the same, but with bulk timber.
Why isn’t panzerholz wood used everywhere? What is the article missing?
Same reason we don't build bridges out of titanium: panzerholz is more expensive than normal wood, and normal wood is good enough for most applications where it's used.
Titanium's strength is in its weight: steel's Young modulus is almost twice as high, so you'd have to build rather large bridges to compensate. Titanium is useful where weight is a concern, like things you launch into space. Steel is perfect whenever weight isn't a concern and sometimes still works really well because you get so much strength out of so little which is why there are so many fans of the thin, shock absorbing, steel bike frames.
Titanium's advantage is imo not so much its weight, as aluminium is better still in that respect. Titanium is mostly better where corrosion and temperature resistance are important. Relative to weight, high grade steel, titanium and aluminium are about equal in tensile strength.
> Titanium is mostly better where corrosion
Until we mix metals and have galvanic corrosion, where an Al + Ti system corrodes exactly where the metals touch.
It's not titanium that will corrode when you have an aluminium frame bike with a Ti bolt at the bottom bracket.
> Relative to weight, high grade steel, titanium and aluminium are about equal in tensile strength.
Scale of the artifact is also a variable if size is a constraint.
Those steel bike frames don't have much in common with the steel used for structural steel. They both are iron alloys with added carbon content, the similarity stops there.
Similarly trying to compare "titanium" to "steel" is dumb. No one uses pure titanium for structural purposes & there are hundreds of common steel alloys.
> thin, shock absorbing, steel bike frames
Please stop repeating this FUD. The notion that a rigid steel frame provides measurable shock absorbtion over the supple, air-filled, rubber tires is mind numbingly stupid.
The limiting factor in most structural uses of wood is stiffness not strength.
You could build your floor joists out of scaffolding boards, but they'd bend unacceptably.
Stiffness is basically a product of geometry rather than strength. Making your wood stronger doesn't help you if you need it to be stiffer.
As you can see from Figure 3a at the top of the third page of the paper, this densified wood is about ten times the stiffness of natural wood, in the sense of Young's modulus. Stiffness is basically the product of Young's modulus and geometry, not geometry alone.
Does it remain so stiff for decades, as would be needed in construction? Many wood treatments' effectiveness fades after time.
My assumption is that it would. Steam-bent wood stays bent once it cools and the lignin sets. It's a lot like thermoforming plastic.
There's another advantage of putting wood through a heating-and-cooling cycle: you remove internal stresses that cause it to twist.
I'm curious about that too. See my comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44027557 for more.
Thanks, I actually just read that and replied there as well. I didn't even notice it was from the same person.
You've been extremely informative and helpful, thank you.
Thank you! I am not a specialist in the area so I may be overlooking something important.
"armor wood"
There was a inventor in Germany which got featured in a science show on television, which did something similar. He build a big pressure cooker where he placed the wood and a liquid mixture inside and let it cook for many hours. The wood got soak through completely, which gave it, as he claimed, resistance against rotting at every layer. For outdoor appliances the wood would not need any coating and not deteriorate. There was no mention about the hardness, but he also didn’t press it.
Pressure treated wood is a very common outdoor building material.
InventWood's research paper mentions not just boiling, but boiling it with an "aqueous mixture of NaOH and Na2SO3", which also helps with "partial removal of lignin and hemicellulose".
Steel, itself, is a material with a wide range of properties. In terms of tensile strength, which is the simplest kind of strength to measure, steel ranges from mild steel at 400 N/mm^2 to piano wire alloys at about 2500 N/mm^2. "Stronger than steel" is a flashy appellation that usually means you have just reached the bottom end.
A similar phenomenon occurs sometimes in papers about ceramics research. A very tough ceramic will often see a comparison of its fracture toughness to that of aluminium; as you've guessed, this usually refers to the toughness of pure unalloyed aluminium.
Liangbing Hu at UMD, checks out. Fantastic find! This should at least be the top comment on this thread to offset the content-free journalist pablum that's linked.
The strength is 483–587 MPa, I seem to see when skimming, which is indeed superior to ASTM A36 structural steel (250MPa yield strength). In Extended Data Figure 1c, they reported the density as 1.3g/cc, a sixth of the density of steel. (Extended data figure 2f plots density against lignin removal percentage.) Of course high-strength steels are stronger, but not six times stronger.
As for the process, they didn't just boil the wood; they boiled it with lye (2.5M, the "food industry chemical") and sodium sulfite (0.4M, technically also a food industry chemical, used for example as an antioxidant in wine) for 7 hours before densifying it with 5MPa for "about a day", removing optimally 45% of the lignin. This is similar to the sulfite chemical wood pulping process that preceded the Kraft paper process, just carried out at high pH and not taken to completion, so in a sense I guess the result is sort of like Masonite, which is also made from cellulose fibers from wood bonded with the wood's natural lignin.
Environmental concerns may be an obstacle; sulfite pulping is nasty. Also presumably to mass-produce the stuff they'll want to find ways to shorten the cycle time, and maybe already have.
The burning question that arises in my mind is why nobody was doing this in 01890, 135 years ago. Sulfite pulping was going gangbusters, building materials were booming, environmental concerns were largely unknown, and there was a rage for everything newfangled, modern, and "scientific". The scientific discipline of strength of materials, needed to calculate the benefits, was already well developed. Mason put Masonite into mass production in 01929, with a process involving autoclaving wood chips at 2800kPa. So what prevented someone from selling Superwood back then? Did nobody try partial alkaline sulfite pulping and pressing the result?
“Just so you know, people from this era haven't started writing 4-digit years with the leading zero yet.”
People have been doing that since at least 01998.
https://web.archive.org/web/19991128020723/http://longnow.or...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation
> established in 1996 ... The Long Now Foundation hopes to "creatively foster responsibility" in the framework of the next 10,000 years. In a manner somewhat similar to the Holocene calendar, the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem[2] (e.g., by writing the current year "02025" rather than "2025"). The organization's logo is X, a capital X with an overline, a representation of 10,000 in Roman numerals.
---
They zero pad, but it doesn't seem like anyone else does so with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar
They look to me like zip codes or octal numbers before I think of years. :-)
Except:
error: invalid digit "8" in octal constant error: invalid digit "9" in octal constant
But why only one leading zero? You can show you care somewhat more about the future by writing 002025, but then someone comes along and writes 000002025 ...
I appreciate that people have started to think about this already, but could I propose an alternative system. Borrowed from Warhammer 40k The Long Now was founded in 998.M1. It's a little jarring at first, but that would easily get us to the 999th Mellenium and wouldn't be too hard to reference BCE dates as 005.M-0
Part of the strength is from Cellulose Nanocrystals (CNCs), which are modern (mid-01900's) and still being heavily researched. I was just at a conference where people were presenting work on making CNCs (and lots of other biomass conversion) more sustainable: H2O2 instead of SO4, greener versions of DMF like Cyrene, etc
My daughter recently started researching extracting/converting CNCs from fabric blends (currently cotton/elastane like spandex). Reading this post made me wonder if we can then remake fabric from CNCs, strong against knives or bullets?
> I was just at a conference where people were presenting work on making CNCs (and lots of other biomass conversion) more sustainable: H2O2 instead of SO4, greener versions of DMF like Cyrene, etc
This all sounds very interesting if you have any links!
The conference was International Symposium on Green Chemistry [1], here's a previous HN comment I made [2], and here's a quick Dropbox-dump of my non-personal pics from there [3].
Many of the slides aren't available yet, but I'll try to curate some from photos. I'll put photo number from Dropbox, since they make direct-linking hard.
Photo 62 to 67 shows the H2O2 work from Mark Andrews' lab at McGill, being commercialized by a company called Anomera.
Photo 8 and 9 has a Cyrene whitepaper from Merck/Sigma-Aldrich. They did have presentations about it, but I don't have notes, will try to get from my daughter as she wants to try it for her process.
Photo 16 has a revisualized Periodic table of elements, logarithmically scaled by availability and color-coded with scarcity / conflict / need. We only have 100 years of Indium left and that was sorta worthless >20 years ago and now used in every touchscreen. had photo but put source link instead [4]
Photo 2 shows that we are now man-making stuff at a greater rate than the earth is creating stuff and that is rapidly increasing. The point there was that we will keep doing this, so we need to make it sustainable and circular. Photo 5 shows how FUBAR'd we are.
Happy to try to answer other questions, but noting I'm not a chemist but a chaperone, so I'll have to ask other people.
[1] https://www.isgc-symposium.com
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43974375
[3] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/5u8xmvcxv5x1zyzaq0jxu/APJPtEo...
[4] https://www.euchems.eu/euchems-periodic-table/
Apparently it's not just me who thinks when someone says "food processing chemicals" that "hey, lye is food processing chemical too" - used to industrially peel mandarins. Weaselwording to make things sound benign.
> 01890 .. 01929
curious: What's with the funky date notation? Is this the new cool thing?
> The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.
https://longnow.org/about/
This is just stupid. What bug?
We still write year 476 as 476. We don't have to write 0476 to prevent confusing it with 1476. It's not confusing.
There are problems we absolutely should be thinking ahead 8000 years to solve for (or help mitigate)– climate change, species protections, sustainability, etc.
Call me skeptical, but reformatting dates for a "bug" in 8000 years seems extraordinarily silly. To think humanity will likely be using the same time measurement systems, computers that operate remotely similarly to ours today, same written/spoken languages, etc is laughable. 8000 years ago, the entire world's human population was roughly equal to that of London today and still just figuring out agriculture.
It's really about the broader lesson, to emphasize that we're just at the beginning of history and that we might benefit from long-term thinking.
Even in passing comments in the 'year of the clock' 02025 to some forum? So the idea is that the computing systems in the YotC 12025 parsing hackernews from a 10000 years prior would experience a "bug" when encountring 4 digit dates?
You know, back in 01999 we were sticking representation of dates into these bit sized 'registers'. Certainly hope by the time we hit 10000 CE "long term thinking" has made significant inroards in the field of information processing ..
> why nobody was doing this in 01890, 135 years ago
Maybe because at that time tropical hardwood was readily available at low cost?
Tropical hardwood is weaker than structural steel rather than twice as strong.
why are you making the choice to place leading zeroes on your years?
I appreciate this quirk as a way to quickly recognize and know to pay extra attention to his invariably top-quality posts.
Aw, thanks!
blushes
He'll have the last laugh when Y10K rolls around...
Indeed, but it's almost 8.000 years until that happens, so to me it just looks unnecessary and distracting.
It's for your descendants, so theirs LLMs are more accurate.
Probably adoption of the "long now" foundation style ?
I see. a brief google search didn't bring up anything in relation to the leading zero concept, but that helps. at a brief glance, their use of the leading zero seems like ... clever marketing?
Their home page first sentence states : "The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking."
So I don't know if the concept is explained in more details elsewhere, but I think it's clearly an integral part of their communication.
my analysis of it is that it's a way of making people wonder "oh why is he writing it like that?" like I did, lead them to the foundation, and have them engage with it and be aware of it in the future; i.e. marketing. it's quite clearly not a practical thing. the probability that by the time 10000AD rolls around we're still using the same year system, we're still alive as a species, we're still technologically capable as a species, and we don't have the capacity to understand older years minus the leading zero seems near enough zero to be zero. call it what you like, marketing, inspiration, whatever, but it's a sneaky way of leading people's thoughts onto a particular pathway, which I call marketing
to be clear, having read through their website, I think what they're doing is great, and this isn't a criticism
We already refer to years in the first millennium AD without leading zeros, e.g. AD 42 or AD 385.
I was born in the 20th century. I was filling out a medical form and put my birth year in with 2 digits. The web app took that to mean just the 2 digits. No, I wasn't born in AD 70.
That's the kind of programming that makes you reluctant to put anything into it.
Not using leading zeros seems fine if you're using AD near it to indicate that it's not 1942.
IIRC wood processed for strength was used in aviation until 1940s, so maybe somehow similar processes were known.
I suspect that the problem us, as usual, in the price. Also possibly with the high anisotropy of the material
> This should at least be the top comment on this thread to offset the content-free journalist pablum that's linked.
The posted Techcrunch article directly links to the Nature paper, it is the very first link of the article
The antibacterial properties of penicillin had been discovered many times before it was eventually realized what a big deal it was in 1940 (Howard Florey's role is much more important than Flemings' for that reason).
So it's entirely possible that the process was found, and discarded straight away because they didn't realize how cool their invention was.
That's one possibility. Another is that it has a critical drawback; Masonite siding resulted in a massive class-action lawsuit verdict due to moisture damage (though the researchers say Superwood is less vulnerable) and it occurs to me that maybe structural steel's plastic deformation when overloaded as a construction material is somewhat more forgiving than the brittle fracture behavior typical of wood and evident in the photos of their ballistic testing.
I've worked with masonite too many times. That stuff is garbage and doesn't belong anywhere near a house.
That it has a fatal flaw is indeed a possibility, but I don't think it could be the reason why it hasn't been invented sooner: if anything, we are detecting these kinds of flaws way faster than we used to, so it's likely that in the past it would have been produced at scale long before we found the problem, and given that consumer laws were nonexistent back then, it could have been kept on the market long after the flaw had been found, as long as it is economical enough to produce.
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Total layman but I assumed that lignin was the molecule that was actually making the wood hard ? How does removing it improves hardness ? Why is there an optimal amount ?
As for the reason it wasn't my wild guess would be that they were already mining for coal so it may have been more economical to just dig the ground with quasi-slaves rather than having more competition on the wood resource and waiting for it to boil whereas you can just produce steel bar by the kilometer in a factory.
Removing some lignin allows you to compact the wood more. If you remove too much the wood falls apart when you try to compact it.
I think that your critique of Gilded Age exploitative labor practices is not to the point.
Thank you for your response.
I'd argue that it is to the point insofar as the price of labor is important to the competitiveness of a finished product, isn't it so ?
I think your response stems from the fear of me trying to turn this into something "political" but it seems to me that going down the mine has been really hard work and low pay for most of History. I am pretty sure that most historians would agree that mining is one of the easiest use of slave labor (go down the mine and bring back the stuff failing which you will be punished, also no skills required) from the point of view of slave owner/manager that is. I am also sure they would agree that after the abolition of slavery, you could consider a big chunk of mine workers, quasi slaves. Hell, even today, mining is one of the main use for drug-addicted labor force in Myanmar and child labor in Congo.
Our ancestors in the 1800s worked under conditions we find atrocious, because that was the best work they could get. Not because they were some kind of slaves.
By 2025 standards, the 1890s were a time of extreme poverty, low technology, and medical ignorance. Life was short and hard, but also much better than a century earlier.
In a century, people will hopefully say the same about our time.
It was only the best work they could get because they had been forced out of the countryside by cost increases, automation, and centralization of land ownership. They teach about the enclosure of the fields in schools for a reason: what had once been communal property of villages throughout England became the exclusive property of the nobility. By and large, if people had a choice they preferred to remain a peasant: you lived in the countryside, breathed clean air, stayed close to the friends, family, and community you were raised with, were self-sufficient, had space and time to raise a family, worked on your own schedule (at least day-to-day), didn't have to let some 'boss' treat you like a slave, didn't have to fear being 'fired', so on and so forth.
To quote an economist (Branko Milanovic) who's done work on this topic in the context of 19th century Serbia attempting to industrialize their peasant population:
> All contemporary evidence points to the fact that peasants were not at all keen to move to cities and work for a wage. Since there was no landlessness very few people were pushed by poverty to look for city jobs. Political parties which strongly (and understandably) represented peasantry further limited mobility of labor by guaranteeing homestead (3.5 ha of land, house, cattle, and the implements) which could not be alienated, neither in the case of default on a loan nor in the case of overdue taxes.
> This situation was very typical for the late industrializers in South-East Europe. Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia were all overwhelmingly agricultural with small peasant landholdings and no landlessness. All displayed slow or arrested capitalist development and half-hearted urbanization. The reason was simple: farmers had no incentive to move from being self-employed to being hired labor. And who would prefer to switch from being one’s own boss and dependent perhaps only on the elements to become a hired hand, working six days a week all year round, in “satanic mills”?
> ...
> The question is, how do you industrialize under such conditions? Reluctance of peasants, whenever they had their own land, to become industrial workers has been discussed (Gerschenkron, Polanyi). In England they had to be literally chased from land through enclosures; in France, the process was much more overdrawn and took a century; in Germany, Poland and Hungary, large estates owned by nobility and consequent landlessness did the job. In Russia, it was bloody and occurred through forced collectivization.
> ...
> The process whereby agricultural economies industrialized was wrenching. The displacement and unhappiness of the population dragged into industrial centers through either empty stomachs or outright terror was incomparable in its human costs to today’s similar transfer of labor from manufacturing to services (or to unemployment). The transformation in the underlying economic structure is never easy but it seems to me that the one from the fresh air and freedom of own farm to being a cog in a huge soiled machine of industrialization was the most painful.
Being "forced out of" work by automation is how we have progressed during the last 250 years of the Industrial Revolution. It continues today.
Fewer people can produce as much food as before, so the people not needed for food production can start producing other things.
This can of course be a tragedy for the people left without work, but for society at a macro level it is hugely beneficial.
This era in England has a bad reputation, and by our standards it was awful, but by objective measures like average lifespan, population size and technological progress, it was a time of unprecedented progress and material improvement for common people.
Did people lose a sense of community as they left their ancestral villages. Probably, and I don't know how to weigh that against our immense wealth today.
> Removing some lignin allows you to compact the wood more.
Yes, lignin puffs up the wood, when some of it is removed by boiling and then heated up and pressed at the same time, carbon molecules bond with each other exponentially more.
I was researching this subject two - three years back. Anything that needs to be able to move at some point, benefits a lot by being 6 times lighter. Also buildings are always constrained by their weight when trying to make them as tall as possible.
Labor is a necessary component of the finished goods. Therefore its source, cost, availability, and "externalities" relative to competing formulations is indeed relevant.
I would have thought that they remove the Lignin and replaced it with a (structurally better) resin.
in Finland they seem to have a similar method, where they bake the wood (they don't press it), the wood is then stable against rot and pests. please note: don't experiment with your oven at home, it will be unusable afterwards (because of the evaporating resins)
Heat treated wood is used in the US as well. I’ve seen heat treated ash used for exterior purposes.
Can this make, say, planks out of sawdust?
MDF includes some binders, but is essentially this. Doubt the glue-free version would stick together well, but maybe.
The sawdust planks wouldn't have the properties of the long-grain wood fiber planks though. The fibers that make up natural wood are what makes the wood tough.
This is kind of how plywood is made - take wood chips and glue and press them together. I feel it wouldn't work well with sawdust, even with the chemical and heat+pressure process, since there would be little natural cohesion between the particles (larger pieces = more strength, up until you have entire logs/boards).
That would be fiberboard, not plywood. Plywood is "plies" of wood veneer layered perpendicularly (cross-grained) to improve dimensional stability.
>>This is kind of how plywood is made - take wood chips and glue and press them together.
You are evidently thinking of chipboard, not plywood.
Chipboard (also known as Particle Board), is a wood composite material of wood chips and sawdust, compacted and bound together with adhesives.
Plywood is made of multiple cross-layered wood veneers, pressed with adhesives.
A bit more detail at [0].
[0] https://www.thewoodworkplace.com/plywood-vs-chipboard/
Large chips glued together is Oriented Strand Board (OSB). Small chips glued together is Particle Board. Sawdust glued together is Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF). Plywood is layers of veneer--thin sheets of wood--glued together in alternating orientations.
Plywood can be nice. It doesn't expand with temperature changes like planks and doesn't have a grain direction that it can split along.
The others, I hate. Any small amount of moisture and they delaminate. OSB is so ugly and rough that you need to hide it because you'll never be able to apply enough primer to cover the chip pattern. I'd rather just use regular plywood at that point. Particle board is the same, but I'm okay with the kind coated on both sides with melamine. It's pretty hard to get a much flatter surface than melamine particle board without spending ridiculously more on granite.
But MDF is the worst. A lot of people like MDF because it's easy to work and can be fairly structural, if you use it right. But it's very, very easy to damage, has absolutely zero edge strength, and it makes a super-fine, extremely carcinogenic sawdust that is extremely difficult to clean up completely. Yes, all sawdust is carcinogenic, always wear a mask in the wood shop, but MDF sawdust never goes away.
Frankly, it's just easier to get a bunch of sheets of birch plywood and southern pine dimensional lumber shipped direct to my house and not worry about it.
probably not. This does not work by adding a binder, like a plastic. This process softens the wood and then compresses it. I'm not sure that doing that with sawdust would give you enough tensile strength.
That seems to really only provide benefits in use cases where weight isn't an issue, since this is conceptually just taking out air and adding more wood into the same amount of space to increase strength.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but almost all use cases for wood rely on it to be somewhat light, for which the lattice structure is already fairly ideal.
No, density is doubled, but strength is increased 11×, according to the paper. Sandwich panels with strong, stiff face sheets will always beat relatively homogeneous material like natural wood for the kinds of applications you are talking about.
Oh interesting, then it laminating thin sheets of this should be far lighter for the same strength, I didn't expect the strength increase to be anywhere near 2x much less 11x.
Nile Red did it on youtube... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CglNRNrMFGM
I've seen this video, he did a pretty good job, but his chemical treatment didn't penetrate at all. I suspect he would have benefitted from pressure cooker during that step. this is how treated lumber is treated to get full penetration of whatever chemicals they use.
given the depth the of the penetration, he basically case hardened it. you can see in the bullet tests that the interior laminations are much fatter than the exterior layers.
It's a good video. He based his work on / followed the protocol described in the Nature paper published by the lab mentioned in the article (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476).
I keep hoping to see advancements in lab grown wood beyond what was reported a few years ago. My dream is enormous sheets of plywood with many layers of fibers all with ideal orientations, grown at sea on barges, taking up growing nutrients and e.g. fire retardant minerals from sea water. The barges would cross the equator seasonally to maximize sunlight.
Seawater is pretty nutrient poor in many places. The places where seawater is nutrient rich there tends to be a lot of biodiversity already.
I’m honestly curious, what makes this better than farming pine trees?
I'm skeptical that the soil in a lumber forest will remain viable for growing trees indefinitely. Crop rotation and fallow is necessary for sustained growth of other crops, it's probably necessary for trees too, just on a larger timescale.
Crop rotation is needed for yearly crops that deplete soil. By harvesting them, you’re removing the nutrients.
As I understand it, you’re not taking any significant amount of nutrients when you harvest the trunks of trees and leave the branches behind to replenish the soil.
Controlled burning can also be used to speed up the process. Some species of pine trees actually require fire to reproduce.
There are questions about making the soil more acidic. Pine trees grow better in acidic soil. Correlation is not necessarily causation.
Lignin is C31H34O11, all stuff that the tree can get from air and water, so you've got a point there.
But a tree trunk is more than just lignin. Also it could be more complex than whether you're robbing the soil of nitrogen and phosphorous. There's a lot we don't know about the role of soil microbiota, for instance. I don't have any evidence that it's going to be a problem, but nobody has evidence that it's not going to be a problem either (only that it hasn't yet).
Although I guess this is all orthogonal to whether, once you've harvested the wood by whatever means, you process it into something stronger and denser.
As someone else mentioned, pine trees aren't a great material. But apart from that, giant monoculture forests are not excellent. Old growth forests host a degree of biodiversity and ecological function that tree farms generally don't.
Lab / barge-cultured wood products could potentially have really great materials properties that the natural stuff doesn't. Plywood is super useful stuff, and the best is made from more layers. The orientation of the wood fibers is flipped 90 degrees from layer to layer to give its strength in multiple dimensions. The more perfectly uniform the grain of each layer, the better quality the plywood. Voids and grain runouts create a locally weak spot or cosmetic issues. Weak spots generally don't correspond through layers, and the material generally isn't pushed to its theoretical limits in application. And cosmetically, better quality plywood reserves the highest quality layers for the outermost visible layers.
Baltic birch plywood is considered The Good Stuff and is made by essentially peeling a tree that grows pretty straight and pretty uniform. But you can imagine growing a seamless sheet of plywood that is even more perfect. Maybe one or two layers of fibers running one direction, before the next layer is encouraged to flip orientation. The platonic ideal of plywood, without needing to peel trees and stick layers together with glue.
And again, if we get freaky with the cell cultures, you can imagine cool properties where layers take up minerals from sea water that help with e.g. rot resistance or fire resistance. Or even freakier, maybe we figure out how to incorporate synthetic or lab cultured spider silk with our plywood, giving it truly novel material properties.
Pine trees specifically are low quality wood. Key issues with natural wood generally are warping due to humidity and misaligned fibres, strength, rot.
There's a big dynamic range in pine. For example, I work with everything from big-box-store lowest-cost pine lumber (2x4s) to kiln-dried select pine.
The low quality stuff is full of knots, warped (with very high variable humidity- some beams weigh 2x other beams). The high quality stuff is.... not as nice as maple, but certainly it's dense, uniform, and doesn't warp. From what I can tell, it's because they select the high quality stuff, then kiln-dry it and mill it.
Also if you inspect cheap 2x4s, there are often some higher quality pieces (few knots, straight-ish, not too wet) which you can then trim and plane to get decent wood.
But yeah, pine is sort of an industrial product grown fast at scale.
That's a silly statement.
Pine is well suited to its use, otherwise, well, we wouldn't use it!
It's by a massive margin, the most common lumber used in construction. Its strength and other properties are well understood and all you have to do is follow the specifications and it performs great.
I mean what would even be the advantage to using other woods for home construction? Using a "stronger" wood means what? You can make your structural members smaller than 2x4? What would be the point? Walls need space for insulation and wires and pipes, there's no good reason to use a more dense wood. And it would still be more expensive! Pine is perfect for what it does because it meets the practical and engineering needs at the least expensive price.
Your comment is even sillier, friend. Pine being a low-quality wood doesn't mean it's not useful.
> Pine is well suited to its use
What isn't well suited for it's use?
Computers. We put a lot of work into keeping certain data scarce and that's at odds with the nature of a computer, which is much better at making copies than preventing them.
Woodworking. Tables, chairs, etc. You typically a want a hardwood for these crafts. However, it you're going to make cheap stuff that won't last... pine is fine.
Hardwood would make terrible construction lumber, which is the point the person defending pine was making.
This is a common misconception usually spouted off by “elite” (aka beginning) woodworkers. Pine (white pine in particular) is a great material for woodworking. Much cheaper and more forgiving than harder species, takes stain well, and looks incredible when properly finished. If you think it won’t last, go look at pretty much any barn built over 100 years ago in the eastern US that is still standing. More often than not you’ll find thousands of board feet of old growth white pine inside. Similarly, many heirloom pieces from the same region and period are pine. They used what they had.
https://www.finewoodworking.com/2022/06/16/for-the-love-of-p...
The problem is that you can't get old growth pine, you can only get construction grade pine anymore.
I've been woodworking for decades and would never use it for furniture. It moves way too much with the seasons (fine for barns where you can build large expansion joints, but not for my chair), and it doesn't take stain well unless you take additional steps to prepare it beforehand.
Also many/most barns used whatever wood they had available. In my area the insides are mostly cottonwood and the outside is oak.
That's not an argument to use pine. It's an argument to use whatever you have at hand.
Lots of modern construction is well behind the times. Eg most new residential buildings in England are still brick instead of wood stick framing and insulation. At least they adopted cavities! But houses in England are correspondingly cold and damp and cost a fortune to heat up. If only they imported more pine!
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> Pine is well suited to its use, otherwise, well, we wouldn't use it!
This statement works just as well if you replace "pine" with "leaded gasoline".
A lot of people seem to think my statement is a tautology, but it's not.
It's exactly my point that not every material is good for its use. Even ones used in the overwhelming majority of cases -- like leaded gasoline. The ensuing environmental disaster shows it was exactly the wrong choice of material to solve the problem.
True, although I’m not sure I understand the comparison. Are there negative externalities to pine framing that other types of wood wouldn’t have? Or is the concern with wood framing in general, as opposed to some other kind of building system?
Cool word play…but that doesn’t invalidate any of their points?
Trees are still farmed for the wood. This is only a method for processing the wood into a stronger material.
The fact that it's a wonderful example of a silicon valley solution
That and the maximised sunlight
Waves.
Potentially a major boon if you want to distribute nutrient bath across a large flat cell culture plate!
Also, trees sway in the wind.
You have strange dreams.
Strange but fantastic
Anyone can comment on this? Just reading this article, and not bothered by any relevant knowledge here, I'm scared that they're turning "harmless" wood into some sort of super product that is hard to break down later for recycling? Like how we did a nice job switching from Styrofoam to paper cups, except they now have a plastic liner that makes the paper hard or impossible to recycle? Or how I wonder what the city recycling is going to do with those "wooden" kitchen cabinets that I dropped off, that are completely covered in a plastic finish?
Cross Laminated Timber (CLT), which I assume this is closely related to, is being used in construction more often now. It's much lighter and stronger than steel, easier to work with, holds up well in a fire because it doesn't go soft and loses structural integrity like steel does. And while wood of course can be burned, the char layer that forms on the outside protects the inside so it actually has some safety properties that buy people time when there is a fire. Also, wood is an excellent insulator.
Laminated timber is also very construction-friendly. It can be worked with simple tools, and CNC machines allow for prefab components to be shipped to the site and assembled quickly with minimal fuss.
There are some plans for high rise construction with this material. E.g. there is a plan for a skyscraper in Tokyo (350 meters, 70 floors).
The adhesives used in laminated timber aren’t perfect. They’re very durable, which is great for structural integrity. But it also means the material breaks down more slowly in a landfill (if you decide not to recycle the material for some reason). However, newer adhesives used for this these days are less toxic and not that harmful in a landfill. And importantly, most of the material is actually just wood, not glue.
(I know nothing about this)
Is it possible to make smaller scale CLT, with thinner boards or something, and build like cars or airplanes out of it?
CLT is in no way similar to the product InventWood is working on, besides that it uses the same base material, and I guess requiring some pressing. You can think of CLT as being like plywood, but for beams instead of for sheets.
That said, CLT has 2 major advantages over regular wood:
1. It is more dimensionally stable, it expands/contracts less and in a more uniform way.
2. It is cheaper at larger dimensions. I.e. 0.5m x 0.5m x 20m wooden beams would take decades to grow and even then not realiably, but you can just manufacture CLT beams with those dimensions easily out of <10yr old trees.
Those two advantages are not limiting factors for the construction of cars or airplanes, so CLT is not super relevant to them.
Dimensional stability isn't irrelevant to planes. Thermal cycling is inevitable when going from the ground to cruising altitude and back.
Make CLT from thin enough boards and you got plywood
Early cars and planes were made out of wood. So, I see no reason why not. The mosquitto which was one of the most successful planes in WW II was made out of plywood, which you could think of as an early form of CLT.
A lot of modern cars are made with a lot of composite materials that probably have better properties. But I imagine CLT could work well for things that are currently made out of steel or aluminium on such cars. I'm not sure if there's a big advantage to doing that in terms of strength, weight, or durability though. Aluminium might be lighter. And composite materials provide better strength and weight.
RIGA chair factory tour >> https://youtu.be/IndP2IKXTP0
If you follow the link from the article [1], then there's an abstract that describes the process. It sounds like they boil the wood with sodium hydroxide and sodium sulphite, then heat and compress the wood, which somehow leads to better alignment (and/or linking?) of the cellulose polymers.
I don't know what the implications are for recyclability, but there's no mention of injecting other materials so perhaps it decomposes in a similar way to ordinary wood?
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476
The pressure treated wood used for railway lines is already damned near impossible to get rid of.
Depends a bit on the country and era of the sleepers ('ties' in US), but traditional wooden sleepers are treated with creosote [0], which is tar/oil impregnation.
I'm no expert on this subject by any means, but I happen to volunteer at a museum where we have steam trains running. We build our tracks to look traditional, so we use wooden sleepers and no ballast. Most of our sleepers are donated from the commercial railroad companies, typically they are old stock but we also receive used ones occasionally. In my part of the world wooden sleepers aren't common anymore, so it's getting harder to find usable ones. This is a concern for us, as apaearantly there aren't any suppliers left in our part of the world for new ones. At our museum they typically last for about 15 years, mainly because we place our sleepers directly on the soil (no balast). The tar/oils will eventually dry out and the wood will just rot/decompose naturally. Wooden sleepers are considered chemical waste in my part of the world, though I do believe we are allowed to let them decompose fully as biomatter, which goes quite quick if in contact with moist soil. Though we typically dispose our used sleepers at a specialized waste facility, I'm not sure how they process it there.
Oh, and in case you are wondering: no, they don't burn, so we can't use them as firewoord for our steam engines ;-)
Appearantly in the USA, at least as of 2008, around 90% of all track was still using wood [1]. I didn't expect that. For most of the world we have used concrete sleepers for a long time already. Plastic sleepers are also common nowadays, which are typically made from recycled materials.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creosote [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_tie
> Appearantly in the USA, at least as of 2008, around 90% of all track was still using wood [1]. I didn't expect that. For most of the world we have used concrete sleepers for a long time already. Plastic sleepers are also common nowadays, which are typically made from recycled materials.
This is for a few reasons, but the two primary ones are that wood is very cheap and plentiful in the US compared to most of the rest of the world, and we haven't banned creosote in the US like most of the rest of the world, so creosote treated wood is still the most common type of railroad tie.
You'd think that there'd be a robust secondary market for treated rot resistant timber that's "too rotten for trains, but perfect for landscaping". Sure, there's chemicals in it but if it's safe enough to be embedded in untold miles of rail bed then surely it's safe enough for comparable landscaping use.
Like everything else there's probably some 2nd/3rd order consequence of regulatory perversion that prevents it. Like because of the circumstances it wrongly gets classified as hazmat or something.
creosote railroad ties are commonly found in landscaping around here. unfortunately, they are hazardous waste, thusly getting rid of them is a bit of a hassle.
In the UK you can buy used railway sleepers for landscaping, as well as new ones: https://www.uksleepers.co.uk/
I know you "can" buy them but I've never seen them for sale in my state or surrounding ones save the occasional classified posting. Perhaps you can buy them in parts of the country with different regulatory priorities.
Same with telephone poles.
My big orange and blue hardware stores have them and I have used them for landscaping.
My understanding is that wood isn’t only pressure treated, but also soaked in chemicals that bugs and decomposers don’t like to eat.
That's true, at least around here [Germany]. Plus the nasty stuff might leak into the environment over the decades, and it's a pain to dispose of.
IIUC, they replace them with plastics since the plastic is seemingly more ecologically friendly and easier to recycle.
Mind concrete sleepers are what's used these days. You'll find wood only in shunting or cargo yards. (Or museums. Or the US - see linked commen by LeonM).
Source: I randomly met someone involved with that project. A proper train enthusiast can probably elaborate here, but I think I remember the core idea correctly. Also this obviously doesn't necessarily hold globally, though I can imagine many track operators face similar challenges.
Edit: While I wrote the above, LeonM wrote a nice reply on a sibling comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44028161
I think pressure treated implies chemical impregnation--the pressure is used to diffuse the preservative through the wood.
Your fence probably has chemicals like that too.
then the carbon trapped in that wood is staying there for much longer than it would otherwise
Not sure the point is to recycle it but rather to have a more carbon friendly alternative to steel. It would also have the benefit of making us less reliant on steel in places where wood supply is ample.
I suppose if it doesn't decompose that makes it a decent option for Carbon sequestration. That might actually be better in a strange way than if it did break down.
It's entirely possibly to make steel with an electric arc furnace powered by your choice of energy input.
And steel is 100% recyclable, indefinitely.
Hard to beat.
“your choice of energy input” is carrying a lot of weight in your statement. producing steel from iron ore is extremely energy intensive. it’s true that once produced, recycling steel is less expensive.
but steel doesn’t store carbon (except the small carbon input used to turn iron to steel)
wood, on the other hand, is a carbon sink.
Remember to factor in all the trees that will need to be cut down in order to provide the wood.
Of course, over time we can increase the amount of industrial forest, but that will take 40-50 years.
That's the whole point, to remove trees from the land, so new trees can grow and extract carbon from the atmosphere.
no, wood is not a carbon sink. its gets turned back into co2 as it decomposes.
> > a more carbon friendly alternative to steel.
> Hard to beat.
Since wood is actually carbon negative, it still manages to beat steel.
Sure but the infrastructure required to do that is probably (my guess) more extensive than a wood press and some chemicals
actually recycling steel is not 100% lossless in that everytime you decrease purity which leads to a point where the still can only be used in low grade products. building materials is usually one of the low tiers though.
Iron ore is contaminated with all sorts of crap, far worse than scrap steel. If what you are saying were true, it would be impossible to make high-grade steel from iron ore.
Impossible in an electric furnace (which could be powered by renewable sources).
Virgin steel requires the higher temperatures of a coke-fed blast furnace.
It does require a reducing gas such as the CO produced by coke, but an electric arc furnace can of course reach higher temperatures. Iron can be smelted successfully from ore even without a high enough temperature to melt it, as in bloomery smelts, but the quality of the resulting metal is quite uneven.
then again we have hundreds of years of economies of scale in place for that process, and (presumably) far less for repurifying steel. I'm not saying it's not possible, of course it's not, but is it financially viable with current infrastructure? I'm genuinely asking, I don't know anything about this.
I'm no expert either but I think you can use the same process, though most steel recycling is instead done more cheaply done in EAFs.
The article cites them on the carbon impact, as if to say it's an environmentally more-sustainable option. And the reduced carbon impact is great, but I'm sure it's not the only factor to consider in the overall sustainability and my attention was drawn to the ability to recycle, since we (not you, but certainly _me_) are being lulled into thinking that it's "just wood".
Well, as they say, "Perfect is the enemy of wood".
Call me cynical but I expect that if it's anywhere as good as the promoters claim competing industries will lobby and astroturf until whatever glues they're using get neutered or rendered economically much less viable on an environmental basis or they'll find some niche performance area where it's worse and get the building code written in a way to use this deficiency to make it much less frequently usable and it'll be 20yr of that incrementally getting rolled back it actually gets used it in any volume.
In addition to recycle issue, paper cups also have PFAs that goes to our bodies.
It's probably the same process as this video on making bulletproof wood: https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM?si=hfDKE33s7YlB1e9L
Compress the wood and then inject it with resin to stabilize it. Effectively it's only very partially wood and more resin at the end.
After double checking, the video references the science paper from the article, so yes, it's 100% the same process.
Where in that video do you see the injection of resin mentioned? I didn't immediately see that step from skipping through, and it's not mentioned in the abstract of the paper.
Yeah, just watched that very entertaining video and there is no resin in that bulletproof wood - it's just had all the lignin squeezed out and cooked under pressure.
Yeah my bad I confused it with another one of his videos.
No, this process doesn't involve adding any resin or other binders. The result is still entirely wood.
This is not the first article I have read about it. Throughout all of them, though, one main question I still could not find an answer to is: stronger than which steel? HSLA, carbon, rebar?
Other than that, I'm all for it. We're renovating our house currently and made some structural changes. Would've loved to exchange some load-bearing steel beams with wooden ones so we could even leave them exposed as a design element.
Not only do we need to ask which steel, we also need to ask which strength. Off the top I my head, if were thinking about contructing buildings, then I'd want to know:
It would be truly shocking if it had better e.g., tensile strength.I'm also interested in how long it retains those properties. Steel can rust, but some alloys the rust protects the rest, while others it will rust away. Salt is also a factor in rust (important near the ocean). Wood often rots in water.
They claim the fire properties are good, but I don't know enough about fire to know if they tested all the important properties.
Direct quote from the article:
> The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better
Sure, but only if you choose a steel with a low tensile strength. There are common steels with between 200 and 2000 MPa tensile strength, whereas I understand this wood material has about 500 MPa.
This is (imho) impressive, and much better than untreated wood, but I think it's misleading to say "stronger than steel" when that labels a huge range of materials.
The article claims "50% more tensile strength than steel"
You can probably do that already without this material. Glued laminated timber is already a pretty good material for such cases.
Absolutely, its unfortunately just a matter of cost. To get an equally sized wood beam that could support the weight, its almost 5x the price. Even factoring in other materials and labour.
CLT is not inherently more expensive and the cost difference is typically less dramatic. Steel just has a few centuries of a head start on learning curves, economies of scale, etc. Scaling up usage of CLT would bring down cost just like it has with steel.
The biggest issue actually is that there's a lot of resistance in the construction industry that is simply locked into using steel and concrete and more or less blind to the advantages of wood. Switching materials would mean new tools, new skills, etc. are needed. I have a friend who is active in Germany pushing the use of this material and he talks a lot with companies in this space.
Companies seem to default to doing what they've been doing for a long time without considering alternatives. Many construction projects are actually still one-off projects that don't leverage economies of scale or learnings from previous construction projects. Construction could be a lot cheaper and much less labor intensive than it is today.
CLT could actually make on-site assembly a lot simpler and faster than it is today. Ship pre-fab components created in large scale facilities optimized to manufacture those cost effectively. Assemble on site using simple tools and processes.
I don't work in the industry, but from my admittedly very consumer-oriented perspective that wanted to build a house for a while:
The reason why economics of scale never really made sense in this context was that shipping the prefab components to the building site mostly wiped out the savings.
Ignoring the actual shipping cost (which is substantial for heavy things that get assembled into a house), it also comes with the risk of things getting damaged while en-route etc. another reason is the fact that places in reality very rarely are actually the same. They can do best effort, but things will likely still vary a little. That's another error scenario wiping out a good chunk of the savings, which fundamentally doesn't exist of you just build on-site.
I'm not knowledgeable on this new material to judge wherever this could potentially change this status-quo, but I wouldn't hold my breath either.
I think the concerns you raise aren't actually show stoppers for a lot of prefab housing that has been happening for decades.
Wood is a lot lighter than steel and concrete. And that has to be transported as well. So you'd have less cost there, not more. About 50% weight savings. That's a lot of diesel.
As for parts getting damaged. That's what insurance an warranty are for. I don't think that's a show stopper issue.
And there are advantages to producing prefab components in a facility that is optimal for that and climate controlled that has all the right tools, specialists, equipment etc. Also, pooring concrete in the winter is problematic. Water freezes. And it expands when it does so. Working with steel is a PITA when it freezes as well. It conducts heat very well. Construction sites aren't very active in the winter in those places that have them for this reason. Prefab wood components don't have a lot of these issues. You can still work wood when it freezes. And bang in some nails. Or drill holes.
It isn't a show stopper, but it is why site built it competitive with prefab unless (as is all too common) prefab cuts corners. Prefab because it needs to ship on current roads often has size limitations of the modules that limit how you can arrange your house.
It’s not just construction company resistance to change.
The regulatory landscape around home building is intense. Especially for fire code. You basically have an entire industry of inspectors whose job is to fail things that don’t match any known pattern, so getting new patterns established is quite difficult.
There is likely also some resistance to it in the home insurance space where they are incredibly data driven, so until you have data built up to justify the statistically supported lower prices of stone houses, the insurance companies will keep premiums higher resulting in non standard materials being limited to the wealthy or fanatics willing to eat the cost.
Yes, the Glulam alternative tends to be a bit more expensive for some applications, but I am surprised that it is 5x more expensive than the steel solution. The reference I have (in Europe at least) is that the cost of Glulam is currently about 350 €/m³. Steel is quite more expensive, but of course, the profiles are slender, so less material is used.
Are you saying that wood is 5× the price of steel, or that glu-lam is 5× the price of wood?
Stronger than steel... I guess you won't be nailing it, I guess you'd have to prefab parts so you could drill through with like a carbide endmill since, unlike steel, you can't just use a magnetic drill like you would for field drilling holes.
Im willing to bet steel drill bits in a hand drill will still drill through it, it will just take longer like if you were drilling a notoriously hard wood like hickory. In practice you might need to actually go with smaller pilot holes and work up to bigger bit, rather than the average contractor method of jamming a half inch drill bit directly into some pine and forcing it through. But its not like anyone who regularly drills holes doesn't know that denser or harder materials need to be drilled with progressively increasing drill bit sizes.
Stronger (tensile and compressive strength) doesn't necessarily mean harder. Maybe hardened steel tools can actually cut it fine.
On second thought, while that makes it less practical for western construction, this material would be extremely suitable for Japanese framing methods.
Do they not use saws?
They actually use mostly chisels, but my point is that every cut in every structural member is done custom by hand at the warehouse in advance. i.e. where tooling is most flexible
Take ipe for example. It's janka hardness is around 3600, which is >< double what most consider a hardwood. It drills fine, with some caveats:
1. It's very dense
2. The first hole is usually easy enough, but consecutive holes become more and more difficult.
3. This is much less a factor of density than of silica content. Silica sands the metal. Carbide and cobalt bits can help a lot, but the silica always wins.
Worthy note: High silica wood dust, eg from ipe, may as well be considered worse than asbestos. It's evil stuff and will destroy your tools and your lungs inevitably.
Edit: while I don't know the silica content of a wood that's roughly twice the (janka) hardness of ipe, such woods also seem to drill ok, depending on the bit. Two examples are Lignum Vitae and Quebracho. The latter, I think, means axe breaker and was named appropriately.
Edit 2: it's Day of the Insidious and Relentless Typo. Nailing any of the mentioned woods is about as practical as nailing your own hammer. Either the nail will bend before making a dent, or the wood will split.
I'd imagine you'd use it for load bearing. This would mean a lot of the only framing could be cheaper and easier wood to work with.
For all those who are peeved by "stronger than steel" claims: No it's not. Or only in an extremely specific, not very practically relevant way. Their Nature paper [1] has the details, but let me summarize:
Tensile strength along the fiber direction is up to 600 MPa, which is higher than mild steel used for ordinary construction (~400 MPa). Except that mild steel is isotropic and highly ductile, i.e. it will deform by 50% or so before finally breaking, while the densified wood will snap as soon as its strength is exceeded. There are also steel grades that are way, way stronger than mild construction steel.
Flexural and compressive strength is up to half as high (300 MPa, below mild steel).
Strength in the weakest direction (across fibers) is around 50 MPa, or 1/8 of mild steel.
This densified wood is essentially a rather weak fiber composite. With careful planning it can be used instead of steel in construction, but their marketing is simply BS.
1. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476
From a quick read, this appears to be referring to the same process as was used by NileRed in their video about making bulletproof wood (https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM). It should be interesting to tool around with when it hits store shelves.
Another video from a different YouTuber: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VC4d5iai3GE
That video was my first thought when I heard about this a few days ago. I always wondered how it was possible to make wood this strong yet it seemingly had no use cases. Maybe it's finally about to find some real world use cases.
What’s the limit on how much wood we can produce? I hear people say using wood is good for carbon capture, but trees take a lot of time to grow, no? If we started using 2x to 10x the amount of wood as we did before, wouldn’t we deplete our stock of trees?
It matches marketing hype, but they seem to have a timeline of this summer. Does anyone know the drawbacks of this material?
> The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better ...
Maybe torsional, compression, flex, etc. strength isn't so good?
Otherwise, why focus on the construction industry? How about airplanes? Cars and trucks?
I work in the industry and forsee the drawback being the price and the market. To buy any kind of "engineered" wood the most cost-effective options will be parallel strand lumber followed by glue-laminated lumber.
This product is going to be extremely expensive and will not complete with existing engineered woods.
A YouTuber reproduced the process: https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM
(The original process is documented in the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476)
I suspect the issue with the other use-cases you mentioned is that it's very rigid. It isn't at all ductile or bendable the way steel is. It would either need to be pressed directly into the shape you need during manufacturing or pressed into a large piece of raw stock then subtractively processed to get the shape you need.
Pressing might be economic for standard profiles like beams but it won't be for pieces like the chassis of a car.
To be clear, "pressing" here doesn't just mean a standard hydraulic press, the press also needs to be heated and the wood needs to be held under pressure for a while. You can't just stamp it the way you can with steel panels.
Could you imagine how nice it would be to have the wood pressed into a single panel like like the tesla gigapress. I realise that it would have its drawbacks, but that wood paneling would look sublime.
"How do I make EVs more flammable ?" On the flip side at least when they catch on fire they will probably burn cleaner ?
Wood actually has some properties that make it desirable in a fire: the charring creates a natural barrier and it doesn't melt meaning it holds structural integrity. This makes it very desirable for building construction, but for cars it means it can act as a fire barrier potentially, and save lives.
EVs are 10x less flammable than ICEs, so the wood would help bridge the gap.
Are you sure EV batteries are less flammable than diesel?
> Otherwise, why focus on the construction industry? How about airplanes? Cars and trucks?
Space elevators!
There's are wooden escalators...
Stairway to haven: Antwerp’s wooden escalators are among the last in use in the world -- https://www.belganewsagency.eu/stairway-to-haven-antwerps-wo...
How about wooden space escalators?!
Those can't be made with beaMs. Must invert concepts and switch a consonant. Suggested course of action is to genetically engineer a tree that directly makes itself of this super-strong wood and grows all the way up there. Tree must come from beaNs.
Maybe limitations wrt the shapes it can easily take on? One of steel’s advantages in vehicles is its plasticity. Whereas construction mostly just requires materials that are flat and straight.
Out of three material manipulation techniques: Cutting, Joining & Forming, it would fall short on 'Forming'.
Yup, and there are also limitations on joining. Steel and wood are joined in very different ways with different physical properties of their joints and different spatial profiles for joints as well. You can’t weld wood.
Maybe not - if you steam wood you can bend it lots. The compression part might then be doable with rollers, loosely like forcing extruded steel.
To some degree. But you’re probably not going to get strength out of sharp bends. And does steaming interfere with this treatment?
I’m assuming there’s a reason this story includes a quote at the end that’s specifically about I-beams.
I looked up the numbers in the original paper a little (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476)
I don't know much about materials science, but I had a few classes about it.
Seems like their wood gets ~550 MPa in ultimate strength in tension. Seems like their material is brittle (so it behaves like a spring until it breaks), therefore you probably want a safety margin, because at 550 MPa it breaks. Note the unit is a Force/Area, you can compare materials with the same cross-section. In compression they say it's about 160 MPa in axial load, it can be more or less in the other directions (due to wood having fiber it's not the same in all directions, and there they compress it perpendicular to the fiber so they get one direction stronger than the axial load and one weaker, but I guess for a beam you mostly care about axial strength). Torsion and flexion are directly dependent on compression, shear and tension, didn't find shear. Although I'm not entirely sure how it works for materials that aren't the same in all three directions like steel.
For steel, depends on the steel but a quick search (https://www.steelconstruction.info/Steel_material_properties and https://eurocodeapplied.com/design/en1993/steel-design-prope...) says ~200 to 400 MPa in tension for yield, at which point it starts changing shape instead of behaving like a spring, then 350 to 550 MPa for strength, at which point it breaks. I believe in multiple applications they do go apply forces where the metal bends a bit and adapts to its application, but I'm not sure. Regardless, that would mean the wood in tension is equivalent to very strong (presumably very expensive) steel.
In compression, steel is from 170 to 370 MPa apparently(https://blog.redguard.com/compressive-strength-of-steel, didn't find much else easily because numbers were strange on other sources), so I guess steel would win on that one.
But this is comparing the raw strength. In reinforced concrete, you add the metal for tension resistance, concrete is there to sustain compression, so it wouldn't matter much. For beams, the shape of beams is optimised to resist in the direction it needs (e.g. the H cross-section resists to bending in one direction). But you probably can't do that with their wood (they say for now they are limited in shapes), so you'd need more material, and probably it would be stronger overall since you have more material. Question then is how much material (in weight, compared to steel) do you need (they say 10 times less but it probably doesn't take into account the shape), and how much does it cost?
I'm guessing they could also make composite beams at some points too, with not only wood in them.
Then for mechanical applications, there might be also other things that enter the game. In their paper they needed to coat the wood so it wouldn't swell with humidity. For any application with friction, not great. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more sensitive to friction than metals.
Note that the numbers are from 2018, they may have improved the process.
Aren't the solvents pretty nasty chemicals? I wonder how they deal with the sodium hydroxide + sodium sulfate saturated with lignin and hemicellulose... maybe it can be turned into a soap or glue? That sounds like a rough biproduct to have to deal with.
I guess those aren't as nasty as I thought, lye and sodium sulfate are pretty innocuous.
It's probably much less difficult to deal with than plastic byproducts.
As it is now, wood pulp and waste products are recycled into plywood and wood composites by binding them with glues and resins. This process allows us to take the wood pulp and produce wood beams and boards without using the glues and resins. With the added benefit that it's even stronger than existing wood composites.
If I understand correctly this process enables recycling wood pulp and waste with less inputs and less environment impact.
I wonder if it could be used to make machine tools. The wood grain structure that remains should be inhomogeneous enough to dampen vibration, and the treatment should make it dimensionally stable, so that it might be better than cast-iron for machine beds, frames, etc.
It's possible that this could replace 1950s and 1960s US made cast iron as the best possible material for large machine tools. (Lathes, mills, jig borers, etc.)
This is cool. On the other hand, maybe somebody could build a tracker for these technological announcements and things that come out after a few years. Batteries are another fascinating one.
Here's one source of data: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=stronger+than+steel
I saw a tip once to do a Google News search on it, add a saved search and let Google email you if anything new comes up. Make sure to use good keywords so you don't get false positive hits on the subject.
> On the other hand, maybe somebody could build a tracker for these technological announcements and things that come out after a few years.
I've sort of had the opposite idea in my head for a while (many years): I wish there were a site that only talks about stuff that's already released and available to consumers. I don't want any future promises, I don't want any pre-orders, I don't want any announcements for products that will only come out in months to years, not even supposed scientific advancements that haven't even resulted in any product yet and may never[0]. I want only stuff that's available right now already.
Hearing about future stuff has only ever made me feel worse. I want to just stop hearing about the future altogether. I wish promises and pre-announcements and whatever just didn't exist.
[0]: https://xkcd.com/678
Similar, this company builds wind turbine monopiles from wood https://modvion.com/
While we're talking wood... does anyone know the process to produce the following "paperwood" material (https://www.core77.com/posts/109646/Plywood-Laminations-So-P...)
I'm assuming its wood veneer with a colored stain on some layers
Are they touting how pretty it looks because it won’t hold stain or varnish well afterwards? What kind of paint and primer would you use? A lot of how a coating performs depends on the structure of the material. If it’s rot, uv and insect resistant that would be a benefit here too.
For those who don't even bother reading those few lines in article:
> Class A fire rated, or highly resistant to flame, and resistant to rot and pests.
I wonder if the alternative to wood is just... wood.
Anecdotal, but I've been to Finnland last year and I couldn't help but see a correlation between (a) big swaths of land are covered in trees and (b) a lot of housing is build with wood.
It's honestly somewhat impressive to see huge structural elements build from what is basically a single glue-up.
So I assume that it's not actually about "wood stronger than steel", but more about (local) availability and/or logistics.
Seems like a larger format version of Lignilock wooden nails https://www.beck-fastening.com/en/innovation/lignoloc
When I lived on a farm in wales, we would occasionally discover in our fields something called bog oak. This was trunks of oak placed in the ground by ancient farmers to drain a field. Over the centuries this had become semi-fossilized and in the process had become very strong. From high quality bog oak, it is possible to make wooden rings as strong as metal. Our bog oak was not so good (I tried) but certainly good enough for super strong dowels and suchlike.
I think the only real problem is compressing wood this way is not fast and you end up spending near as much or more on this compressed wood than you would on many other materials. I still think it has uses but this isn't some new miraculous tech that's going to take over everything and replace stuff like steel which is pretty damn cheap. Wood in its natural form already has some of the highest strength-to-weight ratios compared to non-exotic materials, but it does still has drawbacks.
I am curious how much grain structure effects compressed wood's strength, because with traditional wood you have to either very carefully select your pieces and avoid knots in bad areas, or just super over-build a structure so that no single points are ever a failure point. Like a stud-framed house can use garbage wood because it really only needs like 1/3 of the studs to be a stable structure, the other 2/3rds are just convenience for nailing things to it and in being able to use crappy lumber without any skill or knowledge and still end up with a safe and stable structure. Versus something like a timber frame where there are critical beams holding things up that you don't want a big gnarly knot in the middle of a span.
Thankfully, lumber has developed not-imprecise grading methods that are tied into guaranteed load values that are tied into architectural plans (which themselves include safety margins).
Basics: https://www.southernpine.com/grading-methods/ and https://bof.fire.ca.gov/media/llad34j2/full-14-b-presentatio...
Examples: https://www.nelma.org/the-grade-rule-book/ and https://nlga.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/NLGA-GR-2022-ver...
My local forestery product association already claims that per unit of weight, wood is stronger than steel. We are seeing taller and taller high rises going up with mass timber.
The idea here holds merit and has been attempted before. The video below is a great watch about "bulletproof wood".
This company however is using it for the facade of the building not the structure, which is kind of a yellow flag. Many fancy headquarter buildings are after some novelty to show off. Facade is not a reliable market unless they can somehow integrate their wood into curtain wall systems and other high wind load applications.
https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM?si=LhVQnWZfMyw_wssH
Ipe (Brazilian Walnut or Ironwood) has excellent resistance to penetration for standard lead rounds. It's super-dense and fire resistant. The process for InventWood seems like it is re-creating something similar.
Ipe is actually not attractive for exterior structures. The wood is so dense, stains don't penetrate. Many let it age to a grey/brown patina with annual cleaning and sanding. Inventwood would be a better alternative for exterior work if they have coloring options during the manufacturing process. For Ipe, staining is expensive and time consuming due to it has to be stained like cabinetry, with two passes.
I assume that their first product is for facades because it was easier to get an approval for it? But eventually they want to expand into structural elements too.
If floor and walls were made of this and you fall on it, will it hit and hurt like steel or wood?
Their website [1] shows house built of this wood.
[1] https://www.inventwood.com/
IMO, they should be going after the hardwood flooring market. LVP, engineered hardwood and laminate are all OK, but you could sell this as real wood that is just as durable as LVP. Especially given some of the samples look like teak, ipe, walnut etc, and those species make beautiful but expensive floors.
No pricing mentioned though, perhaps it is too expensive.
Yes, the pricing is what I'm curious about. If they were saying "we can make this for half the price of steel," then the world steel market becomes their growth target.
If they can't get cheaper than steel, if they can't compete with steel, they'll probably never be more than a niche product.
I want flex in my hardwood flooring. Making hardwood that is basically as hard as concrete sort of defeats the point.
You can make a product that is resistant to indentation and scratches while still providing give under your foot. LVP achieves this with various underlayments, the same technique could be used here.
Kevlar, another organic material with a tensile strength greater than steel, also derives its strength from hydrogen bonds between chains:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevlar#Structure_and_propertie...
This sounds very great, but also is probably a smaller incremental step from the engineered "mass timber" already in use, especially in Europe,
Incremental step is good news for me --- makes this making it out of the lab more credible!
Wood can be cut to size on site and composed together with nails and screws. Steel can be welded. I wonder what one does with "Superwood"...
Cut it before it's treated?
At least for residential, wood-framed houses, the framing material is delivered pre-cut. Even roofing beams are pre-assembled and delivered in triangles to the construction site.
I'm sure someone can figure out a program that takes a CAD design and plans all the cuts.
you make pretty structural beams
>Ultimately, InventWood is planning to use wood chips to create structural beams of any dimension that won’t need finishing. “Imagine your I-beams look like this,” Lau said, holding up a sample of Superwood. “They’re beautiful, like walnut, ipe. These are the natural colors. We haven’t stained any of this.”
This sounds a lot like engineered wood beams that have been around for a while. See it used for joists
This is awesome, but will it be cheaper than steel to produce and build with? Will it be cost effective in the long run in terms of maintenance?
https://www.cesolutionsinc.com/blog/2019/11/20-advantages-cl...
CLT is often faster because you can essentially just prefab it offsite and assemble it significantly faster and with less equipment and specialized workers than reinforced concrete. Steel needs steelworkers, plus concrete takes time to set and cannot be poured in all weather conditions.
While this isn't CLT I would imagine you still get most of the benefits (you can cut it to spec offsite and don't have to do anything special with it when it shows up)
CLT is apparently "cross-laminated timber", which would work as a description of plywood but I'm sure is meant to indicate something different.
They're similar but CLT is much thicker and can withstand stronger forces; strength to weight wise, it is better than steel.
Does it take less power and other resources to make?
Does it rely on glues, epoxies, or other chemical processes?
It's kind of moot if the resulting product causes more emissions or is not reusable, bio-degradable or at the very least chemically inert, like steel is (citation needed).
If all of that isn't true, it's just aesthetics.
(most of what I know about this is from a video about making bamboo 'wood' products, which involves a lot of glue)
Does anyone know if extensive genetic editing for construction wood optimization has been tried? Some planted forests have no food chain role whatsoever (like Eucalyptus in Brazil) so this seems super safe high reward endeavor.
Genetically modified (GM) eucalyptus is apparently actually growing in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_tree#Acce... Still ongoing as of 2024: https://www.futuragene.com/releases/futuragene-receives-appr...
> The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better.
This sounds a bit implausible implausible. Steel is insanely strong, especially high strength steels, can be over 1000 MPa.
Here's the original paper:
http://lit.umd.edu/publications/TengLi-Pub91-Nature-2018.pdf
> The densified wood demonstrates a record high tensile strength of 587 MPa.
Yeah... ok it's 50% stronger than very low strength steel.
I think there are other problems comparing it with steel. Steel isotropic; wood is only strong in one direction. Steel has really nice and safe ductile failure modes that wood doesn't. Iron mining is not great for the environment but I doubt hardwood production is either, and steel can be easily recycled.
Seems like a great product but it feels like slightly disingenuous positioning.
What's the cost?
For high load applications, steel is already cheaper than wood, so to compete with steel, not only would this new fancy technology have to be stronger, but also cheaper.
That's probably why they are leaning in towards sustainability and aesthetics instead. They likely can't compete on cost.
I can't find any information on whether or not a table/miter saw or drill would be able to cut/drill through this material
The process sketch in the linked article is soak wood in some unspecified chemicals for a while then compress it (claimed by a factor of 4). Wood is ~400/500 kg/m3 so taken at face value I guess that gives ~1800kg/m3. Pretty much where carbon fibre falls. I'd expect it to be done at elevated temperature too.
I think I'd expect that to work. It's not going to be better than steel, as steel is amazing for a wide range of reasons, but for something in the domain of marine ply / other engineered timber, sure.
If this could save material used for construction, that would be great!
Maybe (touring) skis could be a good application for this? Would be fun if somebody tried it.
This feels like kind of a big deal? How expensive is it?
I really really hope more companies get into this space. The amount of carbon to be saved by replacing concrete with something else is gargantuan.
All to get around regulations for building with steel structures. In the USA it’s way easier to permit wood than steel
Can we build shipping containers from this wood? It should insulate better and may let us build better shipping container homes.
I dated a girl who did this as a science project in high school a decade ago. This has been around for decades. Does anyone know why it is not actually used?
Cool. Conventional hardwoods can be pretty unfriendly to wood working tools, I wonder what the requirements are for cutting and drilling this stuff.
If I remember correctly these things bend under compression in a brittle way
Interesting, they mention that it's more carbon-efficient than steel and concrete, but they don't give an estimate of the energy required to produce such material?
This is the most interesting question.
The process involves boiling and pressing, both pretty energy-dense processes. Maybe not as energy intensive as an arc furnace, but would be curious to know how much less.
Maybe they mean if you make it with solar energy.
Anyone else ready for wooden space ships?
One of my first jobs (~1999) was as a research assistant working on seeing whether it's possible to make reentry vehicle heat shields from oak. Sadly, it wasn't.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/jaxas-first-wooden-satell...
could this lead to multi-story Wood condos
Would this be a good material for aviation?
I'd be curious about the total carbon emissions, all in, to produce this because it seems like an excellent carbon sink. And especially when compared to steel.
so wood rocket when ?
Japan did launch a wooden satellite recently!
Metals could be molded unlike wood.
Wood can be pressed
Can it be used as the frame of a skyscraper?
Can it be used to construct a cargo ship?
Steel is not that strong to begin with, its strength is often overestimated.
Wild question: could you use this for things other than construction? Like aviation? Wooden rockets? Cars?
or ships, specifically sailboats? I would like to know if this would be a more viable material than what is currently used.
does anyone know if densified wood can be used as exterior cladding? Does it handle moisture/sun etc well?
Is there any statement on the resistance of this treated wood to dry rot? It's cool that it's stronger, but if I were say building a house out of this stuff, I would want to know if it's more difficult for fungus to break it down.
Wild guess but I'd imaging it's probably quite resistant to many forms of rot and decay. There's no molecular space left for anything to work it's way in, to intrude.
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Define "stronger"