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Solar-assisted fabrication of large-scale, patternable transparent wood
- 0zelot 6y agoThe process is more involved than it seems at first, nasty toluene is required and only mentioned once in the methods section. The chemical treatment is a bit different, but I would expect similar results and difficulties as NileRed found when following the previous method from the same research group in 2016: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adma.201600427 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adma.201600... Also the drastic change of 1 mm thick balsa wood from rigid to foillike around 00:27-28 in the "Movie S2" of the supplemental material is quite surprising: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2021/01/25/7.5.eabd7342.DC1 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2021/01/25/7.5...
- anshumankmr 6y agoBut by making wood transparent, would it not be even more detrimental to the environment? Plus at least glass is made of silica which we have no real shortage of and it can be recycled as well.
- viraptor 6y agoIn the spirit of "best thing we can do with carbon is bury it", this could be great for the environment. Assumptions: less energy used for production than melting glass, easier process and shorter transport distances, recycling glass takes more energy than burying / decomposing the wood, we get even more commercial reasons for planting trees. The problems could be in how long that "wood-glass" lasts. Will you see cracks soon? Will any insects start drilling your windows?
- chrisco255 6y agoGiven that it's infused with epoxy, as they say, I imagine it would last a long time, and I don't think it would be susceptible to insect damage.
- adgjlsfhk1 6y agoThis is wood soaked in epoxy. The epoxy should provide plenty of protection (note that lots of houses are made of regular wood, so I don't think this is much of a problem anyway).
- viraptor 6y ago> note that lots of houses are made of regular wood Yes, but that's why in certain areas you need to do termite inspections because the treated wood doesn't provide 100% protection. Also the wooden parts are normally protected by other materials to not be exposed to rain and rot - in this one the epoxy layer would likely do that, but still, it depends on good coverage/protection.
- Debugreality 6y agoLeave one side of this transparent wood unpainted and termites would be easy to spot.
- anticensor 6y agos/one/inner/
- chrisco255 6y agoGlass is a poor insulator. They're claiming transparent wood would have better insulating properties, retaining heat inside buildings. A lot of energy is lost through windows.
- qwertay 6y agoThat was already solved by just adding a second sheet of glass with an air gap
- Dan42 6y agoActually there is a shortage of glass-grade silica. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-out-of-sand https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...
- ars 6y agoThat's not what the article says. There is a shortage of sand for cement, which needs rough, sharp, unweathered sand. For glass there is no shortage at all.
- lazylizard 6y agowhy do we still not mandate concrete aggregates must be recycled material? surely industry will find ways to reprocess recycled material to fit requirements??? or use more concrete or more rebar or something? can the folks who mine river or marine sand be tasked to put desert sand back to replace what they mined?
- m463 6y agoWe have no shortage of wood either. It is a renewable resource, and it removes carbon dioxide from the air.
- bagacrap 6y agoBut we don't have an infinite supply of petroleum to make epoxy
- Dylan16807 6y agoI'm sure you could make it out of corn.
- Qwertious 6y agoYes, but can we make out of corn economically? If we don't care about price, we can just use 100% renewables to make glass. And unlike corn-based plastics, the raw materials for glass aren't food.
- aksss 6y agoAnd let’s not forget that to make hydrogen peroxide we need hydrogen. How do we make hydrogen at scale? Hydrocarbons (e.g. natural gas)
- m463 6y agoGeologists: "We May Be Slowly Running Out Of Rocks" https://www.theonion.com/geologists-we-may-be-slowly-running-out-of-rocks-1819571484 https://www.theonion.com/geologists-we-may-be-slowly-running... ;)
- SignalNotSecure 6y agoWe are almost at the transparent aluminum era
- DoktorDelta 6y agoHaven't we had that since a certain engineer divulged the formula to us in 1986?
- sigmaprimus 6y agoAluminium oxynitride or ALON, it is only slightly more expensive than ballistic glass.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hardlianotion 6y agoWe have been on a different timeline since 2009.
- oldmanpants 6y ago> Next, they infused the wood with a tough transparent epoxy designed for marine use, which filled in the spaces and pores in the wood and then hardened so they replaced the wood with epoxy, and called it wood. Like a car where you replace everything but the VIN so it keeps it's identity?
- michaelbuckbee 6y agoIt sounds more like the process that's used with carbon fiber - epoxy is poured around the carbon fiber cloth and the end result is something with properties of both. The article is scant on details so it may still be bunk, but I still think it sounds like an interesting application.
- phkahler 6y agoNo. The white wood has rough surfaces which make them opaque. Filling the gaps with epoxy effectively removes that roughness. Not sure how they "infuse" it. That sounds like driving it deeper. Years ago we had an opaque SLA prototype part. I came in the next day and it was mostly transparent. The M.E. told me they painted it clear...
- jrockway 6y ago> Not sure how they "infuse" it. That sounds like driving it deeper. NileRed did a video about preparing this from a different paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1H-323d838 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1H-323d838 It seems that you just soak the thing in epoxy in a vacuum. The results were not great, though.
- shadycuz 6y agoYup, also AvE https://youtu.be/880a_XgvBEo https://youtu.be/880a_XgvBEo and they both did it 2 years ago.
- prawn 6y agoOne advantage of glass in windows is that, when broken, it will make for a noisy mess. I'd say this partly discourages break-ins to vehicles and homes. If windows were made of something that could be splintered and more quietly pulled apart, I'm not sure it be as useful for the typical glass windows and doors we know.
- Mountain_Skies 6y agoDoes safety glass not already make breaking cleaner and quieter?
- mrits 6y agoYou could add glass bars
- sradman 6y agoTransparent Wood Composites [1] "are novel wood materials which have up to 90% transparency and higher mechanical properties than wood itself". This latest paper Solar-assisted fabrication of large-scale, patternable transparent wood [2] describes a technique that brings this material one step closer to production scale: > Here, we report a method to produce optically transparent wood by modifying the wood’s lignin structure using a solar-assisted chemical brushing approach. This method preserves most of the lignin to act as a binder, providing a robust wood scaffold for polymer infiltration while greatly reducing the chemical and energy consumption as well as processing time. The obtained transparent wood (~1 mm in thickness) demonstrates a high transmittance (>90%), high haze (>60%), and excellent light-guiding effect over visible wavelength. Furthermore, we can achieve diverse patterns directly on wood surfaces using this approach, which endows transparent wood with excellent patternability. Combining its efficient, patternable, and scalable production, this transparent wood is a promising candidate for applications in energy-efficient buildings. This same group has previously described A Clear, Strong, and Thermally Insulated Transparent Wood for Energy Efficient Windows [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_wood_composites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_wood_composites [2] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/5/eabd7342 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/5/eabd7342 [3] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adfm.201907511 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adfm.2019075...
- jiofih 6y agoI read this exact same headline every other month
- jessaustin 6y agoSome universities spend more on PR firms.
- TedShiller 6y agoSounds cool until you read the article and realize it’s just wood with epoxy in it, so basically plastic
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoThis article suggests that it's better to make windows of than glass. So why are windows not made of plastic as we speak, very often?
- bagacrap 6y agoScratch prone?
- AmericanChopper 6y agoA plastic window would need to be quite thick to be as rigid as a glass window. A plastic window would also scratch more readily, and it would likely degrade in the sun (become translucent rather than transparent). It’s not obvious to me that this wooden material somehow wouldn’t have the same problems.
- blacksqr 6y agoBecause the UV wavelengths in sunlight discolor and degrade most plastics over time. Which raises the question of whether the same thing happens with this product, and if not, why not.
- Causality1 6y agoThere's a lot of holes in this article. They made a one millimeter thick sheet of organic matter transparent by bleaching it and then filling it with clear epoxy. None of that indicates a utility for building materials. You could do that to almost anything organic, from a sheet of intestinal lining to a seaweed nori roll. To beat glass and plastic it has to scale. Call me jaded but I think if these guys could produce a transparent 2x4 they'd have shown it off.
- k_sze 6y agoI don’t understand how this can work. Doesn’t hydrogen peroxide decompose pretty quickly when exposed to sunlight?
- sfink 6y agoThe hydrogen peroxide is used for bleaching the wood. Sunlight speeds it up. You don't want any leftover H2O2.
- aksss 6y agoIt’s just used to bleach the wood, like some people do to lighten their hair. The sunlight accelerates the oxidation process. So the hydrogen peroxide does break down but that’s the intention. It removes the pigment from the wood fiber, the epoxy fills in gaps to allow the translucency.
- hinkley 6y agoNilered covered this last summer, as I recall, and he very much disagreed about the grain orientation not mattering. Yes you could make it transparent, but cross grain was only slightly stronger than a stale cracker. He kept breaking the samples and gave up.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoAnd flammable.
- adrianN 6y agoNile Red has a video where he makes this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1H-323d838 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1H-323d838 As you can see from the video it is basically impossible to scale this process to large pieces of wood. Discussions about replacing windows with this are pretty pointless I think.
- mwill 6y agothese are similar approaches but different from a cursory glance, the nile red video is based on a paper from 2016, this was published in 2021 and they are treating 1m lengths of wood and have a 10cm transparent piece that looks far more promising than the 2016 version, or Nile Reds
- neolog 6y agoThe video is 35 min. Why is it hard to scale?
- brabel 6y agoThis video is based on a different paper from 4 years earlier and it uses a different technique. If you read the new paper, one of the main properties of the new technique is that it does not affect the wood lignin, so that the final transparent wood has the same properties, almost, as the original wood. In this video you linked to, the techique involves completely removing the wood lignin (see 4:08). Clearly not the same thing. Another huge difference: in this video, the wood is dropped into a boiling chemical solution for 12 hours. In the new paper, the solution is brushed onto the wood at room temperature, then the wood is left exposed to UV light (which can come from natural Sun light) for just one hour. The video uses boiling, distilled water to wash the wood (for only around 15 minutes), then hydrogen peroxide (in an awkard attempt at removing the lignin left) after the chemmical treatment of the wood, while this paper just mentions using ethanol (5 hours immersion) to remove just the chemical solution from the previous step. The video mentions that after all this, the paper it's based on says they still need to boil the wood into a 8% peroxide solution (the video author decides to use much less, though, at 3% due to "foaming" problems) until the wood turned white, after which they use ethanol to remove the chemicals. In the new paper, this step doesn't exist at all. The UV light is enough to achieve that and the wood had already been washed with ethanol. Only the last step, using vacuum to infiltrate epoxy into the wood, seems to be similar between the two different papers (though the author of the video did not have a very good techique to do that... both papers are quite lean on details, so the author of the video can't be blamed here). I mention all this because you and other people in this thread are choosing to dismiss this new paper based on a video about a completely different paper, using a totally different methodology, which shows that you're either trying to intentionally present misinformation to HN readers, or that you didn't bother to read the new paper at all and just assumed nothing new in it. Please avoid such behaviour in public forums, the last thing we need is more disinformation and lack of depth in our dicussions.
- nitwit005 6y agoThe thin slices shown in the photos seemed a bit suspicious, so I looked at the paper and they seem to be a millimeter thick: > The obtained transparent wood (~1 mm in thickness) And the wood was also from a balsa wood log, so this method is making something remarkably flimsy. At least from what I saw in a previous paper on this idea, it sounds like it's fairly difficult to get the epoxy into a thicker wood sample.
- mkl 6y agoThis is also mentioned near the start of the linked article: "Starting with planks of wood a metre long and one millimetre thick"
- ksaj 6y agoThey also say it is effective up to 3mm with the balsa wood.
- mdoms 6y agoCan you please read the article before posting? The thickness is mentioned in the article and also the fact that the technique works for numerous species of wood.
- nitwit005 6y agoCan you read the hacker news guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- marcodiego 6y agoTransparent guitars! Ok, the process involves epoxying the wood... that would be enough to change sound properties of the wood.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoGuitars are made of lots of woods - maybe this one would actually be better :)
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoYes but its still a great idea and worth a try.
- justinclift 6y agoWonder how long until someone makes a transparent glider or drone with it? :) -- Hmmm, some of the text under the photos in the article are extremely misleading: Researchers demonstrated after brushing a coat of hydrogen peroxide on the opaque wood material, and exposing it to one hour of sunlight, it turns transparent. No mention of epoxy there, though it's literally a key ingredient as mentioned in the full text.
- MauranKilom 6y agoI think the material itself does literally become transparent. It's just that the rough surface makes it look white (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frosted_glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frosted_glass). Just like you can make frosted glass look transparent by e.g. putting some clear scotch tape over the surface (https://i.imgur.com/GZLOfbR.jpg https://i.imgur.com/GZLOfbR.jpg), you can restore the transparency of the wood by filling the gaps with resin.
- ksaj 6y agoIt seems to go from "You merely brush h2o2 and leave it in the sun for an hour" to additional steps involving a lye solution at the start and a vacuum chamber for another hour and a half at the end. I still think it is interesting and probably useful. But it starts off understating the actual effort involved.
- anfilt 6y agoExcept unlike glass this will scratch quite easily. It's why things like plexy glass and polycarbonate have more niche uses.
- simonh 6y agoI suppose you could coat it or laminate it with a harder material like polycarbonate or glass.
- napier 6y agoWould be good with plant derived epoxy polymer.
- godmode2019 6y agoFor housing this might be good, diy a window. Or even prototype labs, glass making looks pretty hard without a factory. But for mass produced consumer items like food and drink jars ect I think this is a bad idea as it will just add to urban waste and recycling problems.
- okonomiyaki3000 6y agoQuestion: If I live in a house made of this stuff, would it be ok to throw stones?
- Daho0n 6y agoThe article literately answers this...
- IshKebab 6y ago*Not actually stronger than glass. (Like every article where a new material is "stronger than X")
- joshspankit 6y agoI’m really disappointed with this narrative that natural fibres infused with chemicals are somehow still natural. “Bamboo fibre” bowls made with plastic for a recent trend: Not just not biodegradable as the name suggests, but also not recyclable. Like “vegan leather” (made from processed crude oil), these terms only seem to take us away from the products that we are actually looking for when something says “natural”.
- dogma1138 6y agoEh? Firstly there are plenty of “natural” or organic epoxies that can decompose. Secondly that’s not the point. Glass is a very energy consuming process, it’s heavy and a PITA to transport and it’s also a very good heat conductor which means for insulation you need to use multiple glass sheets with an air barrier. This material is lighter, it’s a way to sequester carbon, it seems to be less energy intensive both to produce and transport and provides better insulation from the get go. If this can be developed as a drop in replacement for window glass alone it can likely save a lot of energy both in the manufacturing and then in the heating of homes. Even if it’s not biodegradable not everything needs to be, most glass isn’t recycled either, and it’s not like glass recycling is a particularly cheap process. The glass from your glass recycling bin is usually just crushed and added as a filler to other materials not melted to make new glass.
- tonmoy 6y agoI don’t understand what “natural” has to do with the article. The article mentions a new material that is transparent and has better insulating properties and makes no claim about being natural
- loceng 6y agoIs it honest to still call their product wood? That's the question, calling it wood seems to misappropriate/inherit the assumed values of wood to their product. "Transparent wood" feels better than whatever other title they likely could come up with.
- 6y ago
- gtsop 6y agoQuestion: Is this really wood? Can I hammer a nail into it and hang my coat without it breaking or even cracking?
- tenuousemphasis 6y agoAccording to the article it has all the structural properties of wood.
- villgax 6y agoNice, we can then stick like a bunch of these sheets to form thicker workable materials
- merricksb 6y agoRelated, from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24666793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24666793
- imtringued 6y agoI heard about this a few weeks ago. I googled how to recycle (or dispose of) epoxy resin and haven't found anything. That is kind of disappointing. Some companies are trying to develop an epoxy resin formula that can be recycled but that's just a tiny niche of the market. I don't see this going anywhere unless that issue has been resolved for good. Does anyone know more about recycling epoxy?
- rossdavidh 6y agoIt would seem not too difficult to reuse, though. I reuse a fair bit of regular lumber, as for example when I disassembled the old falling-down back porch and made several indoor benches out of it. I would think epoxy-infused wood might be less prone to rot, and so even more reusable.
- MauranKilom 6y agoBecause it's hidden in one of the captions: The volume fraction of wood in the resulting product appears to be around 33%. So by volume it's two-thirds resin and one-third wood. I was hoping the wood fraction would be slightly higher to justify calling it "transparent wood".
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoGlass isn't 'pure glass' either. But it is 70-75% silica so that's better.
- swader999 6y agoI read about this yesterday and wondered the same. Disappointing.
- aurizon 6y agoIf they use an epoxy with the same refractive index as celllose and manage to totally eliminate any gaps/air they will get closer to glass, but I feel it will stilll be a little foggy. They have been playing at this for decades because cellulose is the cheapest fiber. You can use a solution of cellulose(Viscose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayon) that you spin into fine monofilaments to immerse in a similar epoxy pane for the same effect,