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Engineers at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) have found a way to make wood more than 10 times times stronger and tougher than before, creating a natural substance that is stronger than many titanium alloys.
"This new way to treat wood makes it 12 times stronger than natural wood and 10 times tougher," said Liangbing Hu of UMD's A. James Clark School of Engineering and the leader of the team that did the research, to be published on February 8, 2018 in the journal Nature. "This could be a competitor to steel or even titanium alloys, it is so strong and durable. It's also comparable to carbon fiber, but much less expensive." Hu is an associate professor of materials science and engineering and a member of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute.
The process seems to hinge on fine-tuning the amount of lignin present in the wood.
An abstract is available but the full article is paywalled; Journal Reference:
Jianwei Song, Chaoji Chen, Shuze Zhu, Mingwei Zhu, Jiaqi Dai, Upamanyu Ray, Yiju Li, Yudi Kuang, Yongfeng Li, Nelson Quispe, Yonggang Yao, Amy Gong, Ulrich H. Leiste, Hugh A. Bruck, J. Y. Zhu, Azhar Vellore, Heng Li, Marilyn L. Minus, Zheng Jia, Ashlie Martini, Teng Li, Liangbing Hu. Processing bulk natural wood into a high-performance structural material. Nature, 2018; 554 (7691): 224 DOI: 10.1038/nature25476
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Friday February 09 2018, @01:46PM (2 children)
Some more context:
Things vary a lot with grain direction in wood and specific species and metal alloy and heat treatments so even one sig fig is stretching it even for generic handwavy estimates.
Anyways if wood tensile strength is X, steel and most aluminums and most alloys in general are about 5X and titanium is about 10x, metals in general are like 3x to 15x roughly. A single strand of carbon fiber might be 100x but assembled product in bulk epoxy you have to be careful to get 20x. The weirdest thing about carbon fiber is you take a bunch of hydrocarbons from wood and completely rearrange the atoms into CF then its twenty times stronger; well of course it takes a chemical plant to externally create CF whereas wood manufactures itself internally using solar power (although very slowly...) A standard SN automobile analogy is car oil is available thats slightly filtered rotted dinosaur, and fully synthetic, but this product is the equivalent of blend oil thats 50:50, kinda sorta. So its not as good as CF, but its better than plain old wood. Note that the main competitor to wood and CF is plywood and the various engineered chip and dust based composites. If you imagine an almost molecular fine grained MDF, thats kinda what this paper proposes, near as I can tell.
So if your treehouse is suspended by a 2x4 (aka 1.5x3.5) thats about 5 sq inches so a steel of similar strength would have an area of 1/2 inch which is a diameter of 3/4 or so? Now 3/4 wire rope is weaker than a rod of steel but would be handwavy appropriate for a 5 ton crane (I'd look that up and think about factor of safety and maintenance levels and human safety factors before actually trying it...) so you can see treehouses are overbuilt because of material inconsistency and fast decay and difficulty of attachment, assuming your treehouse isn't the size of a garage. McMansion Treehouse LOL. This also explains how trees can sometimes survive 80 MPH winds without tearing to shreds, sure a wind like that is zillions of tons of force but unless the branch is dead and rotted its mostly no big deal.
So yeah if X could be increased by ten, the author's handwavy is in fact about correct-ish.
Titanium is really cool not because its strong by volume, which it isn't particularly as per above, but because its strong by mass, which makes it awesome for submarines and bicycles and stuff. Also Ti is biocompatible, which is kinda cool although not really relevant except for bone replacement implants.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @07:23PM (1 child)
Bone replacement implants was first thing which came to my mind after reading this news. Biological material, strong and tough, comparable or even superior to titanium, and probably cheaper to make...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:17PM
I searched for wood biocompatibility for fun and shockingly some Germans had great success in the 70s implanting common woods in rabbits. I figured there would be an immune response much like cross species organ sharing is non-trivial, but apparently wood is weird enough not to need the craziest level of immunosuppressive drugs. Cool.
I suspect for a long time regardless of the recent influence of robots and AI that labor costs will always wildly exceed material costs for bone replacements. Still, it is cool.