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Most of our building practices aren't especially sustainable. Concrete production is a major source of carbon emissions, and steel production is very resource intensive. Once completed, heating and cooling buildings becomes a major energy sink. There are various ideas on how to handle each of these issues, like variations on concrete's chemical formula or passive cooling schemes.
But now, a large team of US researchers has found a single solution that appears to manage everything using a sustainable material that both reflects sunlight and radiates away excess heat. The miracle material? Wood. Or a form of wood that has been treated to remove one of its two main components.
[...] But rather than simply being structurally useful, the wood has some properties that could make it extremely useful as cladding, covering the exterior of a building. While most of the cellulose fibers are aligned along the grain of the wood, that alignment is very rough—there's plenty of variability in their orientation. That means light that strikes the processed wood will bounce around within a dense mesh of cellulose fibers, scattering widely in the process. The end result is a material that looks remarkably white, in the same way a sugar cube looks white even though each sugar crystal in it is transparent.
As a result, the material is really bad at absorbing sunlight, and thus it doesn't capture the heat in the same way regular wood does.
But it gets better. The sugars in cellulose are effective emitters of infrared radiation, and they do so in two areas of the spectrum where none of our atmospheric gases is able to reabsorb it. The end result is that, if the treated wood absorbs some of the heat of a structure, wood can radiate it away so that it leaves the planet entirely. And the wood is able to do so even while it's being blasted by direct sunlight; the researchers confirmed this by putting a small heater inside a box made of the treated wood and then sticking it in the sunlight in Arizona.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday May 28 2019, @08:05PM (4 children)
You mean we can solve global warming just by paving the earth with a renewable green material?
Why we can all just take up carpentry and intensive tree cultivation (like Weyerhauser does) to save the planet and we won't have to send out any more direct mail solicitations for donations to run our 501C3 organizations.
...
Oh. Wait...
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday May 28 2019, @08:30PM (3 children)
Why land? Earth is 70% water. We could design floating trees of this stuff and put it in Arctic waters. That might draw off enough heat to keep the ice frozen beneath it, and possibly help repair habitats up there. Nothing really stops us from designing floating gardens out in ocean with this stuff.
If the heat really does leave the Earth, then it may be simply a matter of scaling and timing before we're dumping enough heat to counteract climate change. That's on top of what we could put on land.
Wonder if this on a large scale could provide power to space? Could small satellites capture that energy and power onboard systems? Would only really be useful at the poles, but having passive power would be neat.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @01:20AM
Read the paper (linked from tfa), doesn't work very well with cloud cover. Thus best results in Phoenix.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 29 2019, @12:49PM
But then you'd increase shipping times from China to Europe by a week or more. My view on the environment pros and cons? Northwest passage > polar bear habitat just on environmental grounds.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday May 30 2019, @05:49PM
AIUI, you don't really want to be adding heat to satellites and other spacecraft. They sometimes have problems getting rid of the heat fast enough since there's no air to conduct it away. They try to run low power not just because it's hard to get energy up there, but also because it can be a challenge to get rid of the waste heat it produces. And any heat that gets radiated by this wood is going to be essentially just reflected solar energy so you might as well skip the middle-man and use a solar panel directly.
Not sure why it would only be useful at the poles either...the special wood is going to be less effective at the poles, since it'll be getting less sunlight and have less heat to radiate away in the first place. And I don't see any reason why a satellite at the poles would be any harder to power than one at the equator -- what might be hard to power is if you want a satellite that just hangs out on the dark side of the planet. Which might be useful for astronomy I guess, but then you probably don't want to be blasting it with a wide beam of reflected heat that might interfere with your readings....
Not that I'm saying this isn't cool tech...could be great for reducing heating effects of cities, similar to the whole "green roof" ideas that have been going around lately without any of that messy biology stuff. I'd be interested in seeing some kind of comparison between the two actually -- how much energy does this radiate away to space vs how much energy is required to produce it compared to how much energy a typical tree is able to help radiate away by removing greenhouse gasses. Seems like this special wood would require more energy to produce and I'd imagine it probably has a much shorter working lifetime than your average tree, plus the CO2 removed by the tree can keep reducing the energy absorbed by our planet even after the tree is gone, while the wood only works while it's intact and pointing towards the sky. You can't build a skyscraper from living trees and you (probably) can't plant a forest of modified wood, so both will have their niche, but I'd like some actual numbers before we start talking about replacing trees with this stuff. We *could* build a flat, 2D island from this stuff and radiate away some heat, but I'd be kinda shocked if that's better than using the full 3D volume of that ocean for plankton and algae to scrub CO2 instead. Artificial heatsink islands could even have a negative impact by blocking the light from the creatures below.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 28 2019, @08:25PM (11 children)
This sounds cool, but, does this mean cutting down more trees? Buildings with concrete roofs are going to need this treated wood, to cool the buildings? And, it's going to take more trees to get the same amount of lumber, because we throw away the bits that don't cool. So, we have upsides, and downsides to it. And, we've already been doing a great job of defoliating the planet for at least a century.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday May 28 2019, @08:44PM (8 children)
If it can last for decades, who cares how many trees we have to cut down? Just plant more.
My concern is actually seeing this come to market. We hear about a lot of gee-whiz stuff that seemingly goes nowhere, and adoption may be slow and sporadic too.
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(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday May 28 2019, @09:47PM (6 children)
My concern is how much energy and how many toxic chemicals the manufacturing process requires, compared to the final product's benefits.
Lovely. Boiling concentrated hydrogen peroxide. Add massive explosions to the concerns list, then.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @05:05AM (5 children)
well, you do have to take into account that nothing toxic is leaked in rivers etc, and the explosion itself will not damage much more than the building.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @07:43AM (4 children)
Hydrogen peroxide is one of the most poisonous things on the planet. That is why most organisms, including humans, have some sort of evolved resistance to it. It is also a bleach, and will destroy many materials it touches with oxidation. That stuff is nasty and the only reason most people think it is safe is because of they sold it in extremely low concentrations (made even lower by sitting on a shelf, in a warm, moist bathroom in an open bottle) as a disinfectant at the pharmacy, which you aren't supposed to use on wounds, again because it does more damage to you than most every-day germs will when a wound is washed in water.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @11:30AM (3 children)
yes. and if you expose it to the atmosphere it releases oxygen and turns into harmless water very fast, so problem solved.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 29 2019, @12:51PM (2 children)
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday May 29 2019, @07:51PM (1 child)
Reducing? Really?
Oxygen alone is quite a good oxidising agent. Reducing atmospheres [wikipedia.org] don't tend to contain a lot of it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 30 2019, @12:32PM
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday May 30 2019, @06:32PM
Often they go nowhere because they're not as good as the hype. TFS indicates that this new material can do some amazing things, but it lacks any hard numbers about how well it actually does those compared to the alternatives. In fact, TFA even points out that the wood is only really compared to untreated lumber, which isn't typically used for construction anyway. Treated lumber is stronger, and would actually be used in the same applications as this new material. Gee, I wonder why they didn't compare against the actual competition..?
What if the reduction in the greenhouse effect caused by the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere by that tree causes more heat to be radiated away than the amount that would be radiated by one tree's worth of this special wood over its entire lifetime? Younger trees absorb less CO2 than older trees, so if the special reflective wood isn't efficient enough then cutting down and replanting those trees could very well be a net loss. Consider also the extra effort and energy required to produce this wood.
So, the article does give us one or two numbers. One square meter of this new wood can reflect an average of 53 watts. CO2 is apparently responsible for containing 1.68 watts per square meter globally (https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/science/CO2-and-global-warming-faq.html) with global CO2 levels around 3000 gigatonnes (https://skepticalscience.net/pdf/rebuttal/CO2-emissions-correlation-with-CO2-concentration-intermediate.pdf) and a surface area of 510 trillion square meters, that gives around (1.68 watts * 510 trillion) / (3000 gigatonnes) = 0.2856 watts per kg of CO2. Probably reality is more complicated than that, but hopefully that's close enough. Your average tree will remove 48 pounds (22kg) of CO2 per year (https://projects.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.htm), and the half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is ~100 years (from the ucsusa link as above)...so that's 6.2 watts per year from the tree vs 53 watts per square meter from the wood. Seems like a decent random estimate for the amount of lumber in a tree might be around 24 square meters (https://ohioline.osu.edu/factsheet/F-35-02) giving 1272 watts per tree from the new wood material, assuming they can manufacture a square meter panel from a one inch thick slab of wood. It might need to be thicker since they're compressing it. Does still sound like it's kicking the tree's ass, but once you consider that the tree's effect actually compounds year after year...well, it still looks like the tree is getting its ass kicked. So carry on and chop 'em down I guess...if it replaces traditional wood we can mostly ignore harvesting and transportation impacts, although we DO still need to factor in the whole thing about boiling it in peroxide. But I'll leave that for someone else, as I've certainly mangled enough math for one post... :)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 28 2019, @09:03PM (1 child)
If they developed this material on anything resembling old-growth cedar or pine, they should be hung by green ropes in Big Sur.
What this should/likely will mean is growing more trees (in pretty, but ecologically barren tree farms).
What I want to know is: what do you have to coat this wonder white wood with to keep if from mildewing black, rotting, and becoming food for ants? Or, is this just a building material for the Arizona desert?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aiwarrior on Tuesday May 28 2019, @09:15PM
Read the article. The resulting material is a bit far from wood. It actually removes lignin and chemically treats wood to a wood derivate which has quite interesting properties. I doubt that this material is either bio-degradable or ant food :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @08:32PM (2 children)
Giant Sun shield!! Less need for AC and we can keep the planet's temp in check.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday May 29 2019, @06:08AM (1 child)
Writes the AC. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @06:31AM
You cold.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @11:08PM (1 child)
If the thermal effects are just in the surface, make it into paint for existing structures. Fewer trees will die in the process, too.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @01:25AM
Sounds like the effects are in the crystal structure, so it might be more "3D" than normal paint. Much better story here, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6442/760 [sciencemag.org]
Speaking of which, don't put this white paneling anywhere near the Army, "If it moves, salute it. If it doesn't move, pick it up. If you can't pick it up, paint it." (I seem to remember a somewhat racier version of this but it didn't come up in a quick search.)
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday May 29 2019, @01:15AM (7 children)
But wait there's more -- if you live in a place with winter you can double your heating costs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
gah -- I really hated the way TFS was written. Secondly, this might be great the closer you get to the equator, but personally, I'm thinking of painting my house a dark color so it can absorb a little heat rather than reflect it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @02:11AM (2 children)
> painting my house a dark color so it can absorb a little heat rather than reflect it.
Take a look at adding south facing windows (maybe a nice bay window add-on)? I believe that in most cases this will get you a lot more solar gain than anything you can do with normal paints...unless you live somewhere where there is heavy cloud cover in the winter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @03:55AM (1 child)
Heh, the southern hemisphere called and said you're an idiot, everybody knows north facing windows is the way go for solar gains.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @02:28PM
Heh, accusing me of hemispheric bias?
By now the southern hemisphere should be used to the north-south flip of anything solar that originates in the more populous northern hemisphere...
(Score: 2) by engblom on Wednesday May 29 2019, @05:04AM (1 child)
Black is simply just more efficient in transmitting heat as the heat is not reflected back. Thus the sun radiation is absorbed rather then reflected. It also works the other way. After sunset a black house would be cooler because the heat is not reflected back into the house but radiated out into the environment.
As a side note if you want to stay as cool as possible in a hot climate: if you are inside or in shadow, you will have it less hot with black clothes. Only when you are in direct sunlight you benefit from having white colored clothes.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @02:33PM
There is black, and then there is black. At visible wavelengths, black is a good solar absorber. At the long wavelengths radiated (at night, or anytime really) by a warm surface, the same visible black color may or may not be "black" for infrared wavelengths. This varies all over the map with different surface materials.
This is part of the cleverness of the invention in tfs -- it happens to re-radiate at useful IR wavelengths for cooling.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @07:50AM (1 child)
Do the math carefully, as it is usually more expensive (per unit of heat exchange) to cool a building, rather than to heat one. This means that for most places, even those in higher latitudes, a darker house will cost you more money. Even though they cool for a shorter time than they heat, the difference in unit cost makes a big difference in the break-even spot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @09:55AM
My home has exactly zero cooling cost, but decidedly non-zero heating cost. However, I doubt that painting it black would save energy; quite the opposite, it would make it cool down faster in the night.
OTOH, in regions where air condition is required, it might make sense to paint the pole-facing side of your house black. Unless you're in the tropic zone, where the sun may be on any side of the home.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @02:31AM (2 children)
You can even make knives made out of paper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUlHhrL_Zj8 [youtube.com]
It's a pretty tough material, and you can even temper it afterward.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 29 2019, @03:17AM
That's a good channel [youtube.com].
If he can just make a knife out of obsidian he'll be legendary.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @03:47AM
I'd like to see it being used to cut strips off a sheet of paper - that's better at showing how sharp it is. There are other ways of course but a paper knife cutting paper is a good start.