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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the sawing-logs dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @07:43AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @07:43AM (#848815)

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @11:30AM (#848844)

    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)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 29 2019, @12:51PM (#848878) Journal
      This. Plus the atmosphere is already heavily reducing due to all that oxygen in the first place. A little more that decomposes rapidly into normal atmospheric components is not going to have a significant affect.
      • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday May 29 2019, @07:51PM (1 child)

        by pTamok (3042) on Wednesday May 29 2019, @07:51PM (#849054)

        ...the atmosphere is already heavily reducing due to all that oxygen in the first place

        Reducing? Really?

        Oxygen alone is quite a good oxidising agent. Reducing atmospheres [wikipedia.org] don't tend to contain a lot of it.