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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: 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.