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Remember wood paneled station wagons? Well, wood is back, but this time it's not for aesthetics—it's for reducing vehicle weight with renewable materials. Swedish researchers have produced the world's first model car with a roof and battery made from wood-based carbon fiber.
Although it's built on the scale of a toy, the prototype vehicle represents a giant step towards realizing a vision of new lightweight materials from the forest, one of the benefits of a so-called bioeconomy.
The demo is a joint project of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the Swedish research institute Innventia and Swerea, a research group for industrial renewal and sustainable development.
The key ingredient in the carbon fiber composite is lignin, a constituent of the cell walls of nearly all plants that grow on dry land. Lignin is the second most abundant natural polymer in the world, surpassed only by cellulose.
Göran Lindbergh, Professor of Chemical Engineering at KTH, says that the use of wood lignin as an electrode material came from previous research he did with Innventia. Lignin batteries can be produced from renewable raw materials, in this case the byproduct from paper pulp production.
"The lightness of the material is especially important for electric cars because then batteries last longer," Lindbergh says. "Lignin-based carbon fiber is cheaper than ordinary carbon fiber. Otherwise batteries made with lignin are indistinguishable from ordinary batteries."
Research along similar lines is being done a Oak Ridge National Laboratories And North Carolina State University
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday February 12 2016, @07:07AM
Always been my ambition: A wood-framed car with a soft rubber-foam body, smooth latex shell. Only thing that kept me from it was very large and heavy vehicles sharing the same roadways. But just imagine: an Ikea car. "Insert tab A into fuel injection port one." Yeah, we could totally handle that. I vote for diesel. Screw the emissions. This is an Ikea car!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 12 2016, @03:18PM
I don't know about cars, but wooden speed boats [stancraftboats.com] are still a thing.
I like wood, though. It's strong, it grows back, you can work it yourself. The only thing I like more is bamboo, which is even more versatile because you can eat it, too, and it grows much faster than trees because it's a grass. Bamboo can also be processed into yarn so you can wear it as clothing (and doesn't have the terrible qualities of rayon).
Processing the lignin from either source for carbon fiber when you need lighter material is cool, too. My question is, can we set up a loop whereby we grow forests of bamboo to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, process it into carbon fiber and other material for all our structural and electronics needs, and mulch/compost it when we're done? That scratches a lot of itches from excess atmospheric CO2 to stopping deforestation to replenishing lost topsoil.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by jcross on Friday February 12 2016, @11:20PM
This guy I used to go to school with did this:
http://www.joeharmondesign.com/#!the-car/n2j7q [joeharmondesign.com]
They even made the leaf springs out of custom-cut osage orange veneers. Wood is already pretty good for making composites out of. I mean that's what plywood is after all.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday February 13 2016, @12:54AM
All I can say, is Wow! Nice treatment of exhaust isolation from the body. (Now I am thinking "wooden internal combustion engine"; nah, that would never work! Wood is fuel, not structure!)
(Score: 2) by jcross on Saturday February 13 2016, @02:13AM
I think you could make one that served as both fuel and structure, and would run for some amount of time. It would be a very cool conceptual art piece if nothing else.