14 ms·

InventWood is about to mass-produce wood that's stronger than steel

487 points by LorenDB 1y ago

mmooss 1y ago
It matches marketing hype, but they seem to have a timeline of this summer. Does anyone know the drawbacks of this material? > The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better ... Maybe torsional, compression, flex, etc. strength isn't so good? Otherwise, why focus on the construction industry? How about airplanes? Cars and trucks?
- apothegm 1y ago
  Maybe limitations wrt the shapes it can easily take on? One of steel’s advantages in vehicles is its plasticity. Whereas construction mostly just requires materials that are flat and straight.
  - achow 1y ago
    Out of three material manipulation techniques: Cutting, Joining & Forming, it would fall short on 'Forming'.
    - JonChesterfield 1y ago
      Maybe not - if you steam wood you can bend it lots. The compression part might then be doable with rollers, loosely like forcing extruded steel.
      - apothegm 1y ago
        To some degree. But you’re probably not going to get strength out of sharp bends. And does steaming interfere with this treatment? I’m assuming there’s a reason this story includes a quote at the end that’s specifically about I-beams.
    - apothegm 1y ago
      Yup, and there are also limitations on joining. Steel and wood are joined in very different ways with different physical properties of their joints and different spatial profiles for joints as well. You can’t weld wood.
- RetroTechie 1y ago
  > Otherwise, why focus on the construction industry? How about airplanes? Cars and trucks? Space elevators!
  - dsign 1y ago
    Those can't be made with beaMs. Must invert concepts and switch a consonant. Suggested course of action is to genetically engineer a tree that directly makes itself of this super-strong wood and grows all the way up there. Tree must come from beaNs.
  - devoutsalsa 1y ago
    There's are wooden escalators... Stairway to haven: Antwerp’s wooden escalators are among the last in use in the world -- https://www.belganewsagency.eu/stairway-to-haven-antwerps-wooden-escalators-are-among-the-last-in-use-in-the-world https://www.belganewsagency.eu/stairway-to-haven-antwerps-wo... How about wooden space escalators?!
- Youden 1y ago
  A YouTuber reproduced the process: https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM (The original process is documented in the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476) I suspect the issue with the other use-cases you mentioned is that it's very rigid. It isn't at all ductile or bendable the way steel is. It would either need to be pressed directly into the shape you need during manufacturing or pressed into a large piece of raw stock then subtractively processed to get the shape you need. Pressing might be economic for standard profiles like beams but it won't be for pieces like the chassis of a car. To be clear, "pressing" here doesn't just mean a standard hydraulic press, the press also needs to be heated and the wood needs to be held under pressure for a while. You can't just stamp it the way you can with steel panels.
  - worthless-trash 1y ago
    Could you imagine how nice it would be to have the wood pressed into a single panel like like the tesla gigapress. I realise that it would have its drawbacks, but that wood paneling would look sublime.
    - rafaelmn 1y ago
      "How do I make EVs more flammable ?" On the flip side at least when they catch on fire they will probably burn cleaner ?
      - mensetmanusman 1y ago
        EVs are 10x less flammable than ICEs, so the wood would help bridge the gap.
        wizzwizz4 1y ago
        Are you sure EV batteries are less flammable than diesel?
      - PaulRobinson 1y ago
- vogu66 1y ago
  I looked up the numbers in the original paper a little (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476) I don't know much about materials science, but I had a few classes about it. Seems like their wood gets ~550 MPa in ultimate strength in tension. Seems like their material is brittle (so it behaves like a spring until it breaks), therefore you probably want a safety margin, because at 550 MPa it breaks. Note the unit is a Force/Area, you can compare materials with the same cross-section. In compression they say it's about 160 MPa in axial load, it can be more or less in the other directions (due to wood having fiber it's not the same in all directions, and there they compress it perpendicular to the fiber so they get one direction stronger than the axial load and one weaker, but I guess for a beam you mostly care about axial strength). Torsion and flexion are directly dependent on compression, shear and tension, didn't find shear. Although I'm not entirely sure how it works for materials that aren't the same in all three directions like steel. For steel, depends on the steel but a quick search (https://www.steelconstruction.info/Steel_material_properties https://www.steelconstruction.info/Steel_material_properties and https://eurocodeapplied.com/design/en1993/steel-design-properties https://eurocodeapplied.com/design/en1993/steel-design-prope...) says ~200 to 400 MPa in tension for yield, at which point it starts changing shape instead of behaving like a spring, then 350 to 550 MPa for strength, at which point it breaks. I believe in multiple applications they do go apply forces where the metal bends a bit and adapts to its application, but I'm not sure. Regardless, that would mean the wood in tension is equivalent to very strong (presumably very expensive) steel. In compression, steel is from 170 to 370 MPa apparently(https://blog.redguard.com/compressive-strength-of-steel https://blog.redguard.com/compressive-strength-of-steel, didn't find much else easily because numbers were strange on other sources), so I guess steel would win on that one. But this is comparing the raw strength. In reinforced concrete, you add the metal for tension resistance, concrete is there to sustain compression, so it wouldn't matter much. For beams, the shape of beams is optimised to resist in the direction it needs (e.g. the H cross-section resists to bending in one direction). But you probably can't do that with their wood (they say for now they are limited in shapes), so you'd need more material, and probably it would be stronger overall since you have more material. Question then is how much material (in weight, compared to steel) do you need (they say 10 times less but it probably doesn't take into account the shape), and how much does it cost? I'm guessing they could also make composite beams at some points too, with not only wood in them. Then for mechanical applications, there might be also other things that enter the game. In their paper they needed to coat the wood so it wouldn't swell with humidity. For any application with friction, not great. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more sensitive to friction than metals. Note that the numbers are from 2018, they may have improved the process.
- CrimsonCape 1y ago
  I work in the industry and forsee the drawback being the price and the market. To buy any kind of "engineered" wood the most cost-effective options will be parallel strand lumber followed by glue-laminated lumber. This product is going to be extremely expensive and will not complete with existing engineered woods.
The_SamminAter 1y ago
From a quick read, this appears to be referring to the same process as was used by NileRed in their video about making bulletproof wood (https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM). It should be interesting to tool around with when it hits store shelves.
- jchw 1y ago
  That video was my first thought when I heard about this a few days ago. I always wondered how it was possible to make wood this strong yet it seemingly had no use cases. Maybe it's finally about to find some real world use cases.
- Llamamoe 1y ago
  Another video from a different YouTuber: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VC4d5iai3GE https://youtube.com/watch?v=VC4d5iai3GE
relyks 1y ago
This is awesome, but will it be cheaper than steel to produce and build with? Will it be cost effective in the long run in terms of maintenance?
- pasc1878 1y ago
  Does it take less power and other resources to make?
- bobthepanda 1y ago
  https://www.cesolutionsinc.com/blog/2019/11/20-advantages-clt-concrete-steel-cpcd5 https://www.cesolutionsinc.com/blog/2019/11/20-advantages-cl... CLT is often faster because you can essentially just prefab it offsite and assemble it significantly faster and with less equipment and specialized workers than reinforced concrete. Steel needs steelworkers, plus concrete takes time to set and cannot be poured in all weather conditions. While this isn't CLT I would imagine you still get most of the benefits (you can cut it to spec offsite and don't have to do anything special with it when it shows up)
  - kragen 1y ago
    CLT is apparently "cross-laminated timber", which would work as a description of plywood but I'm sure is meant to indicate something different.
    - bobthepanda 1y ago
      They're similar but CLT is much thicker and can withstand stronger forces; strength to weight wise, it is better than steel.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  Does it rely on glues, epoxies, or other chemical processes? It's kind of moot if the resulting product causes more emissions or is not reusable, bio-degradable or at the very least chemically inert, like steel is (citation needed). If all of that isn't true, it's just aesthetics. (most of what I know about this is from a video about making bamboo 'wood' products, which involves a lot of glue)
mschild 1y ago
This is not the first article I have read about it. Throughout all of them, though, one main question I still could not find an answer to is: stronger than which steel? HSLA, carbon, rebar? Other than that, I'm all for it. We're renovating our house currently and made some structural changes. Would've loved to exchange some load-bearing steel beams with wooden ones so we could even leave them exposed as a design element.
- tapia 1y ago
  You can probably do that already without this material. Glued laminated timber is already a pretty good material for such cases.
  - mschild 1y ago
    Absolutely, its unfortunately just a matter of cost. To get an equally sized wood beam that could support the weight, its almost 5x the price. Even factoring in other materials and labour.
    - kragen 1y ago
      Are you saying that wood is 5× the price of steel, or that glu-lam is 5× the price of wood?
      - mschild 1y ago
        The total cost of replacement as quoted to me by contractors is 5x. I've reached out to several and none of the quotes go below it. I'm doing a lot of things myself, but anything that can get dangerous or wildly expensive when I fuck it up I let skilled contractors handle.
        kragen 1y ago
        That's even less clear. The total cost of replacing what with what is 5× what? I think what you want to remove is steel beams, but I'm not even sure of that.
acyclic0 1y ago
Similar, this company builds wind turbine monopiles from wood https://modvion.com/ https://modvion.com/
Gravityloss 1y ago
This is cool. On the other hand, maybe somebody could build a tracker for these technological announcements and things that come out after a few years. Batteries are another fascinating one. Here's one source of data: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=stronger+than+steel https://hn.algolia.com/?q=stronger+than+steel
- ars 1y ago
  I saw a tip once to do a Google News search on it, add a saved search and let Google email you if anything new comes up. Make sure to use good keywords so you don't get false positive hits on the subject.
- LoganDark 1y ago
  > On the other hand, maybe somebody could build a tracker for these technological announcements and things that come out after a few years. I've sort of had the opposite idea in my head for a while (many years): I wish there were a site that only talks about stuff that's already released and available to consumers. I don't want any future promises, I don't want any pre-orders, I don't want any announcements for products that will only come out in months to years, not even supposed scientific advancements that haven't even resulted in any product yet and may never[0]. I want only stuff that's available right now already. Hearing about future stuff has only ever made me feel worse. I want to just stop hearing about the future altogether. I wish promises and pre-announcements and whatever just didn't exist. [0]: https://xkcd.com/678 https://xkcd.com/678
JonChesterfield 1y ago
The process sketch in the linked article is soak wood in some unspecified chemicals for a while then compress it (claimed by a factor of 4). Wood is ~400/500 kg/m3 so taken at face value I guess that gives ~1800kg/m3. Pretty much where carbon fibre falls. I'd expect it to be done at elevated temperature too. I think I'd expect that to work. It's not going to be better than steel, as steel is amazing for a wide range of reasons, but for something in the domain of marine ply / other engineered timber, sure.
liampulles 1y ago
Wood can be cut to size on site and composed together with nails and screws. Steel can be welded. I wonder what one does with "Superwood"...
- senectus1 1y ago
  you make pretty structural beams >Ultimately, InventWood is planning to use wood chips to create structural beams of any dimension that won’t need finishing. “Imagine your I-beams look like this,” Lau said, holding up a sample of Superwood. “They’re beautiful, like walnut, ipe. These are the natural colors. We haven’t stained any of this.”
- gwbas1c 1y ago
  Cut it before it's treated? At least for residential, wood-framed houses, the framing material is delivered pre-cut. Even roofing beams are pre-assembled and delivered in triangles to the construction site. I'm sure someone can figure out a program that takes a CAD design and plans all the cuts.
oulipo 1y ago
Interesting, they mention that it's more carbon-efficient than steel and concrete, but they don't give an estimate of the energy required to produce such material?
- kragen 1y ago
  Maybe they mean if you make it with solar energy.
- floatrock 1y ago
  This is the most interesting question. The process involves boiling and pressing, both pretty energy-dense processes. Maybe not as energy intensive as an arc furnace, but would be curious to know how much less.
Chilinot 1y ago
This seems to be the research behind it: https://www.fpl.fs.usda.gov/documnts/pdf2018/fpl_2018_song001.pdf https://www.fpl.fs.usda.gov/documnts/pdf2018/fpl_2018_song00... And there are only smaller comparisons towards steel. They are more focused on how it compares to regular wood. In summary, what they are doing: 1. Boil the wood. 2. Press the wood. 3. Done.
- kragen 1y ago
  Liangbing Hu at UMD, checks out. Fantastic find! This should at least be the top comment on this thread to offset the content-free journalist pablum that's linked. The strength is 483–587 MPa, I seem to see when skimming, which is indeed superior to ASTM A36 structural steel (250MPa yield strength). In Extended Data Figure 1c, they reported the density as 1.3g/cc, a sixth of the density of steel. (Extended data figure 2f plots density against lignin removal percentage.) Of course high-strength steels are stronger, but not six times stronger. As for the process, they didn't just boil the wood; they boiled it with lye (2.5M, the "food industry chemical") and sodium sulfite (0.4M, technically also a food industry chemical, used for example as an antioxidant in wine) for 7 hours before densifying it with 5MPa for "about a day", removing optimally 45% of the lignin. This is similar to the sulfite chemical wood pulping process that preceded the Kraft paper process, just carried out at high pH and not taken to completion, so in a sense I guess the result is sort of like Masonite, which is also made from cellulose fibers from wood bonded with the wood's natural lignin. Environmental concerns may be an obstacle; sulfite pulping is nasty. Also presumably to mass-produce the stuff they'll want to find ways to shorten the cycle time, and maybe already have. The burning question that arises in my mind is why nobody was doing this in 01890, 135 years ago. Sulfite pulping was going gangbusters, building materials were booming, environmental concerns were largely unknown, and there was a rage for everything newfangled, modern, and "scientific". The scientific discipline of strength of materials, needed to calculate the benefits, was already well developed. Mason put Masonite into mass production in 01929, with a process involving autoclaving wood chips at 2800kPa. So what prevented someone from selling Superwood back then? Did nobody try partial alkaline sulfite pulping and pressing the result?
  - calmbonsai 1y ago
eigart 1y ago
If this could save material used for construction, that would be great! Maybe (touring) skis could be a good application for this? Would be fun if somebody tried it.
TomWhitwell 1y ago
Seems like a larger format version of Lignilock wooden nails https://www.beck-fastening.com/en/innovation/lignoloc https://www.beck-fastening.com/en/innovation/lignoloc
- Daub 1y ago
  When I lived on a farm in wales, we would occasionally discover in our fields something called bog oak. This was trunks of oak placed in the ground by ancient farmers to drain a field. Over the centuries this had become semi-fossilized and in the process had become very strong. From high quality bog oak, it is possible to make wooden rings as strong as metal. Our bog oak was not so good (I tried) but certainly good enough for super strong dowels and suchlike.
sverhagen 1y ago
Anyone can comment on this? Just reading this article, and not bothered by any relevant knowledge here, I'm scared that they're turning "harmless" wood into some sort of super product that is hard to break down later for recycling? Like how we did a nice job switching from Styrofoam to paper cups, except they now have a plastic liner that makes the paper hard or impossible to recycle? Or how I wonder what the city recycling is going to do with those "wooden" kitchen cabinets that I dropped off, that are completely covered in a plastic finish?
- Arn_Thor 1y ago
  Not sure the point is to recycle it but rather to have a more carbon friendly alternative to steel. It would also have the benefit of making us less reliant on steel in places where wood supply is ample.
  - nandomrumber 1y ago
    It's entirely possibly to make steel with an electric arc furnace powered by your choice of energy input. And steel is 100% recyclable, indefinitely. Hard to beat.
    - Arn_Thor 1y ago
      Sure but the infrastructure required to do that is probably (my guess) more extensive than a wood press and some chemicals
    - jdblair 1y ago
      “your choice of energy input” is carrying a lot of weight in your statement. producing steel from iron ore is extremely energy intensive. it’s true that once produced, recycling steel is less expensive. but steel doesn’t store carbon (except the small carbon input used to turn iron to steel) wood, on the other hand, is a carbon sink.
      - KSteffensen 1y ago
nikolay 1y ago
Metals could be molded unlike wood.
- LoganDark 1y ago
  Wood can be pressed
  - nikolay 1y ago
    This is pressed wood already, but it can't be pressed in random shapes.
a1371 1y ago
My local forestery product association already claims that per unit of weight, wood is stronger than steel. We are seeing taller and taller high rises going up with mass timber. The idea here holds merit and has been attempted before. The video below is a great watch about "bulletproof wood". This company however is using it for the facade of the building not the structure, which is kind of a yellow flag. Many fancy headquarter buildings are after some novelty to show off. Facade is not a reliable market unless they can somehow integrate their wood into curtain wall systems and other high wind load applications. https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM?si=LhVQnWZfMyw_wssH https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM?si=LhVQnWZfMyw_wssH
- rob74 1y ago
  I assume that their first product is for facades because it was easier to get an approval for it? But eventually they want to expand into structural elements too.
- Hilift 1y ago
  Ipe (Brazilian Walnut or Ironwood) has excellent resistance to penetration for standard lead rounds. It's super-dense and fire resistant. The process for InventWood seems like it is re-creating something similar. Ipe is actually not attractive for exterior structures. The wood is so dense, stains don't penetrate. Many let it age to a grey/brown patina with annual cleaning and sanding. Inventwood would be a better alternative for exterior work if they have coloring options during the manufacturing process. For Ipe, staining is expensive and time consuming due to it has to be stained like cabinetry, with two passes.
LoganDark 1y ago
Is there any statement on the resistance of this treated wood to dry rot? It's cool that it's stronger, but if I were say building a house out of this stuff, I would want to know if it's more difficult for fungus to break it down.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  Wild guess but I'd imaging it's probably quite resistant to many forms of rot and decay. There's no molecular space left for anything to work it's way in, to intrude.
webprofusion 1y ago
Cool. Conventional hardwoods can be pretty unfriendly to wood working tools, I wonder what the requirements are for cutting and drilling this stuff.
55555 1y ago
I dated a girl who did this as a science project in high school a decade ago. This has been around for decades. Does anyone know why it is not actually used?
meindnoch 1y ago
Define "stronger"
rishflab 1y ago
does anyone know if densified wood can be used as exterior cladding? Does it handle moisture/sun etc well?
sebstefan 1y ago
If I remember correctly these things bend under compression in a brittle way
fcanesin 1y ago
Does anyone know if extensive genetic editing for construction wood optimization has been tried? Some planted forests have no food chain role whatsoever (like Eucalyptus in Brazil) so this seems super safe high reward endeavor.
- wahern 1y ago
  Genetically modified (GM) eucalyptus is apparently actually growing in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_tree#Accelerated_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_tree#Acce... Still ongoing as of 2024: https://www.futuragene.com/releases/futuragene-receives-approval-for-first-ever-genetically-modified-eucalyptus-with-triple-stacked-traits-from-the-brazilian-national-biosafety-technical-commission/ https://www.futuragene.com/releases/futuragene-receives-appr...
eric-p7 1y ago
Anyone else ready for wooden space ships?
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/jaxas-first-wooden-satellite-deploys-from-space-station/ https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/jaxas-first-wooden-satell...
- JofArnold 1y ago
  One of my first jobs (~1999) was as a research assistant working on seeing whether it's possible to make reentry vehicle heat shields from oak. Sadly, it wasn't.
api 1y ago
Wild question: could you use this for things other than construction? Like aviation? Wooden rockets? Cars?
- griffiths 1y ago
  or ships, specifically sailboats? I would like to know if this would be a more viable material than what is currently used.
elif 1y ago
Stronger than steel... I guess you won't be nailing it, I guess you'd have to prefab parts so you could drill through with like a carbide endmill since, unlike steel, you can't just use a magnetic drill like you would for field drilling holes.
- elif 1y ago
  On second thought, while that makes it less practical for western construction, this material would be extremely suitable for Japanese framing methods.
  - timdiggerm 1y ago
    Do they not use saws?
    - elif 1y ago
      They actually use mostly chisels, but my point is that every cut in every structural member is done custom by hand at the warehouse in advance. i.e. where tooling is most flexible
- AngryData 1y ago
  Im willing to bet steel drill bits in a hand drill will still drill through it, it will just take longer like if you were drilling a notoriously hard wood like hickory. In practice you might need to actually go with smaller pilot holes and work up to bigger bit, rather than the average contractor method of jamming a half inch drill bit directly into some pine and forcing it through. But its not like anyone who regularly drills holes doesn't know that denser or harder materials need to be drilled with progressively increasing drill bit sizes.
- mrits 1y ago
  I'd imagine you'd use it for load bearing. This would mean a lot of the only framing could be cheaper and easier wood to work with.
- perlgeek 1y ago
AngryData 1y ago
I think the only real problem is compressing wood this way is not fast and you end up spending near as much or more on this compressed wood than you would on many other materials. I still think it has uses but this isn't some new miraculous tech that's going to take over everything and replace stuff like steel which is pretty damn cheap. Wood in its natural form already has some of the highest strength-to-weight ratios compared to non-exotic materials, but it does still has drawbacks. I am curious how much grain structure effects compressed wood's strength, because with traditional wood you have to either very carefully select your pieces and avoid knots in bad areas, or just super over-build a structure so that no single points are ever a failure point. Like a stud-framed house can use garbage wood because it really only needs like 1/3 of the studs to be a stable structure, the other 2/3rds are just convenience for nailing things to it and in being able to use crappy lumber without any skill or knowledge and still end up with a safe and stable structure. Versus something like a timber frame where there are critical beams holding things up that you don't want a big gnarly knot in the middle of a span.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  Thankfully, lumber has developed not-imprecise grading methods that are tied into guaranteed load values that are tied into architectural plans (which themselves include safety margins). Basics: https://www.southernpine.com/grading-methods/ https://www.southernpine.com/grading-methods/ and https://bof.fire.ca.gov/media/llad34j2/full-14-b-presentation-structural-lumber-grading-basics-july-2021.pdf https://bof.fire.ca.gov/media/llad34j2/full-14-b-presentatio... Examples: https://www.nelma.org/the-grade-rule-book/ https://www.nelma.org/the-grade-rule-book/ and https://nlga.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/NLGA-GR-2022-version-__Website-Pages-1-238.pdf https://nlga.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/NLGA-GR-2022-ver...
IshKebab 1y ago
> The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better. This sounds a bit implausible implausible. Steel is insanely strong, especially high strength steels, can be over 1000 MPa. Here's the original paper: http://lit.umd.edu/publications/TengLi-Pub91-Nature-2018.pdf http://lit.umd.edu/publications/TengLi-Pub91-Nature-2018.pdf > The densified wood demonstrates a record high tensile strength of 587 MPa. Yeah... ok it's 50% stronger than very low strength steel. I think there are other problems comparing it with steel. Steel isotropic; wood is only strong in one direction. Steel has really nice and safe ductile failure modes that wood doesn't. Iron mining is not great for the environment but I doubt hardwood production is either, and steel can be easily recycled. Seems like a great product but it feels like slightly disingenuous positioning.
monicaaa 1y ago
[dead]
rco8786 1y ago
This feels like kind of a big deal? How expensive is it?
smusamashah 1y ago
If floor and walls were made of this and you fall on it, will it hit and hurt like steel or wood? Their website [1] shows house built of this wood. [1] https://www.inventwood.com/ https://www.inventwood.com/
stevage 1y ago
I really really hope more companies get into this space. The amount of carbon to be saved by replacing concrete with something else is gargantuan.
thelastgallon 1y ago
Can we build shipping containers from this wood? It should insulate better and may let us build better shipping container homes.
omer9 1y ago
Nile Red did it on youtube... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CglNRNrMFGM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CglNRNrMFGM
- lofatdairy 1y ago
  It's a good video. He based his work on / followed the protocol described in the Nature paper published by the lab mentioned in the article (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476).
- mml 1y ago
  I've seen this video, he did a pretty good job, but his chemical treatment didn't penetrate at all. I suspect he would have benefitted from pressure cooker during that step. this is how treated lumber is treated to get full penetration of whatever chemicals they use. given the depth the of the penetration, he basically case hardened it. you can see in the bullet tests that the interior laminations are much fatter than the exterior layers.
deadbabe 1y ago
Steel is not that strong to begin with, its strength is often overestimated.
nothercastle 1y ago
All to get around regulations for building with steel structures. In the USA it’s way easier to permit wood than steel
fnord77 1y ago
Can it be used as the frame of a skyscraper? Can it be used to construct a cargo ship?
peatmoss 1y ago
I keep hoping to see advancements in lab grown wood beyond what was reported a few years ago. My dream is enormous sheets of plywood with many layers of fibers all with ideal orientations, grown at sea on barges, taking up growing nutrients and e.g. fire retardant minerals from sea water. The barges would cross the equator seasonally to maximize sunlight.
- kayodelycaon 1y ago
  I’m honestly curious, what makes this better than farming pine trees?
  - literalAardvark 1y ago
    The fact that it's a wonderful example of a silicon valley solution That and the maximised sunlight
  - chillingeffect 1y ago
    Pine trees specifically are low quality wood. Key issues with natural wood generally are warping due to humidity and misaligned fibres, strength, rot.
    - gtowey 1y ago
      That's a silly statement. Pine is well suited to its use, otherwise, well, we wouldn't use it! It's by a massive margin, the most common lumber used in construction. Its strength and other properties are well understood and all you have to do is follow the specifications and it performs great. I mean what would even be the advantage to using other woods for home construction? Using a "stronger" wood means what? You can make your structural members smaller than 2x4? What would be the point? Walls need space for insulation and wires and pipes, there's no good reason to use a more dense wood. And it would still be more expensive! Pine is perfect for what it does because it meets the practical and engineering needs at the least expensive price.
      - 1y ago
Hasz 1y ago
IMO, they should be going after the hardwood flooring market. LVP, engineered hardwood and laminate are all OK, but you could sell this as real wood that is just as durable as LVP. Especially given some of the samples look like teak, ipe, walnut etc, and those species make beautiful but expensive floors. No pricing mentioned though, perhaps it is too expensive.
- mathgradthrow 1y ago
  I want flex in my hardwood flooring. Making hardwood that is basically as hard as concrete sort of defeats the point.
  - Hasz 1y ago
    You can make a product that is resistant to indentation and scratches while still providing give under your foot. LVP achieves this with various underlayments, the same technique could be used here.
- thatnerd 1y ago
  Yes, the pricing is what I'm curious about. If they were saying "we can make this for half the price of steel," then the world steel market becomes their growth target. If they can't get cheaper than steel, if they can't compete with steel, they'll probably never be more than a niche product.
jppope 1y ago
While we're talking wood... does anyone know the process to produce the following "paperwood" material (https://www.core77.com/posts/109646/Plywood-Laminations-So-Pretty-You-Wont-Want-to-Edge-Band-It https://www.core77.com/posts/109646/Plywood-Laminations-So-P...) I'm assuming its wood veneer with a colored stain on some layers
rapestinians 1y ago
[dead]
matthewaveryusa 1y ago
I can't find any information on whether or not a table/miter saw or drill would be able to cut/drill through this material
kazinator 1y ago
Kevlar, another organic material with a tensile strength greater than steel, also derives its strength from hydrogen bonds between chains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevlar#Structure_and_properties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevlar#Structure_and_propertie...
moneywoes 1y ago
could this lead to multi-story Wood condos
mikewarot 1y ago
I wonder if it could be used to make machine tools. The wood grain structure that remains should be inhomogeneous enough to dampen vibration, and the treatment should make it dimensionally stable, so that it might be better than cast-iron for machine beds, frames, etc. It's possible that this could replace 1950s and 1960s US made cast iron as the best possible material for large machine tools. (Lathes, mills, jig borers, etc.)
mppm 1y ago
For all those who are peeved by "stronger than steel" claims: No it's not. Or only in an extremely specific, not very practically relevant way. Their Nature paper [1] has the details, but let me summarize: Tensile strength along the fiber direction is up to 600 MPa, which is higher than mild steel used for ordinary construction (~400 MPa). Except that mild steel is isotropic and highly ductile, i.e. it will deform by 50% or so before finally breaking, while the densified wood will snap as soon as its strength is exceeded. There are also steel grades that are way, way stronger than mild construction steel. Flexural and compressive strength is up to half as high (300 MPa, below mild steel). Strength in the weakest direction (across fibers) is around 50 MPa, or 1/8 of mild steel. This densified wood is essentially a rather weak fiber composite. With careful planning it can be used instead of steel in construction, but their marketing is simply BS. 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476
whiddershins 1y ago
I'd be curious about the total carbon emissions, all in, to produce this because it seems like an excellent carbon sink. And especially when compared to steel.
gwbas1c 1y ago
> Ultimately, InventWood is planning to use wood chips to create structural beams of any dimension that won’t need finishing. “Imagine your I-beams look like this,” Lau said, holding up a sample of Superwood. “They’re beautiful, like walnut, ipe. These are the natural colors. We haven’t stained any of this.” Show the [beep]ing picture!
- downboots 1y ago
  "The company treats it with 'food industry' chemicals"
- rented_mule 1y ago
  The picture at the top of the article appears representative of the surface appearance: https://www.inventwood.com/superwood-beams https://www.inventwood.com/superwood-beams
  - bjt 1y ago
    I know it's practically cliche to say so these days, but that picture is giving strong AI vibes. Look at the joints between the big beams. If you needed beams that large to hold up a building, you wouldn't cut them in the middle like that. And you wouldn't have those gaps. Plus, all the text on the page is future tense, talking about what the super wood beams will be able to do. So I don't know how much that picture really represents what the wood will look like.
    - MichaelDickens 1y ago
      I'm almost positive it's AI generated. Look at the chairs at the kitchen island in the background. No human would draw chairs that look like that. The picture at https://www.inventwood.com/superwood-facade https://www.inventwood.com/superwood-facade also looks AI-generated. The fact that they're using AI images on their landing pages does not give me confidence in the quality of the product.
      - SubiculumCode 1y ago
thomasjudge 1y ago
What's the cost?
- tantalor 1y ago
  For high load applications, steel is already cheaper than wood, so to compete with steel, not only would this new fancy technology have to be stronger, but also cheaper. That's probably why they are leaning in towards sustainability and aesthetics instead. They likely can't compete on cost.
qiine 1y ago
so wood rocket when ?
- gdubs 1y ago
  Japan did launch a wooden satellite recently!
Ericson2314 1y ago
This sounds very great, but also is probably a smaller incremental step from the engineered "mass timber" already in use, especially in Europe, Incremental step is good news for me --- makes this making it out of the lab more credible!
idontwantthis 1y ago
Would this be a good material for aviation?
fho 1y ago
I wonder if the alternative to wood is just... wood. Anecdotal, but I've been to Finnland last year and I couldn't help but see a correlation between (a) big swaths of land are covered in trees and (b) a lot of housing is build with wood. It's honestly somewhat impressive to see huge structural elements build from what is basically a single glue-up. So I assume that it's not actually about "wood stronger than steel", but more about (local) availability and/or logistics.
beached_whale 1y ago
This sounds a lot like engineered wood beams that have been around for a while. See it used for joists
thasso 1y ago
What’s the limit on how much wood we can produce? I hear people say using wood is good for carbon capture, but trees take a lot of time to grow, no? If we started using 2x to 10x the amount of wood as we did before, wouldn’t we deplete our stock of trees?
zhynn 1y ago
Aren't the solvents pretty nasty chemicals? I wonder how they deal with the sodium hydroxide + sodium sulfate saturated with lignin and hemicellulose... maybe it can be turned into a soap or glue? That sounds like a rough biproduct to have to deal with. I guess those aren't as nasty as I thought, lye and sodium sulfate are pretty innocuous. It's probably much less difficult to deal with than plastic byproducts.
- thuanao 1y ago
  As it is now, wood pulp and waste products are recycled into plywood and wood composites by binding them with glues and resins. This process allows us to take the wood pulp and produce wood beams and boards without using the glues and resins. With the added benefit that it's even stronger than existing wood composites. If I understand correctly this process enables recycling wood pulp and waste with less inputs and less environment impact.
throwaway173738 1y ago
Are they touting how pretty it looks because it won’t hold stain or varnish well afterwards? What kind of paint and primer would you use? A lot of how a coating performs depends on the structure of the material. If it’s rot, uv and insect resistant that would be a benefit here too.
- jajko 1y ago
  For those who don't even bother reading those few lines in article: > Class A fire rated, or highly resistant to flame, and resistant to rot and pests.
kylehotchkiss 1y ago
Would be cool if they mass-produce this material enough to frame houses with it. Intrinsic termite resistance could actually allow houses in the southwest to last 100 years. And reduce CA's massive greenhouse gas impact from all the vikane https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-04-03/california-is-biggest-us-emitter-of-this-greenhouse-gas https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-04-03/califor... > The termite killing gas — sulfuryl fluoride — has been found to be 4,800 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat. > When a team of Johns Hopkins scientists set out to map exactly where the gas was being released, they were startled to find that California generated as much as 12% of global emissions of the synthetic fumigant.
- turtlebits 1y ago
  Houses can already can last 100 years+ with proper waterproofing/building techniques and standard lumber. There are plenty of ways to mitigate termites.
hacker_88 1y ago
Future coal material
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
anArbitraryOne 1y ago
Seems like a high-end façade

487 points by LorenDB 1y ago

It matches marketing hype, but they seem to have a timeline of this summer. Does anyone know the drawbacks of this material? > The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better ... Maybe torsional, compression, flex, etc. strength isn't so good? Otherwise, why focus on the construction industry? How about airplanes? Cars and trucks?

apothegm 1y ago
Maybe limitations wrt the shapes it can easily take on? One of steel’s advantages in vehicles is its plasticity. Whereas construction mostly just requires materials that are flat and straight.
- achow 1y ago
  Out of three material manipulation techniques: Cutting, Joining & Forming, it would fall short on 'Forming'.
  - JonChesterfield 1y ago
    Maybe not - if you steam wood you can bend it lots. The compression part might then be doable with rollers, loosely like forcing extruded steel.
    - apothegm 1y ago
      To some degree. But you’re probably not going to get strength out of sharp bends. And does steaming interfere with this treatment? I’m assuming there’s a reason this story includes a quote at the end that’s specifically about I-beams.
  - apothegm 1y ago
    Yup, and there are also limitations on joining. Steel and wood are joined in very different ways with different physical properties of their joints and different spatial profiles for joints as well. You can’t weld wood.
RetroTechie 1y ago
> Otherwise, why focus on the construction industry? How about airplanes? Cars and trucks? Space elevators!
- dsign 1y ago
  Those can't be made with beaMs. Must invert concepts and switch a consonant. Suggested course of action is to genetically engineer a tree that directly makes itself of this super-strong wood and grows all the way up there. Tree must come from beaNs.
- devoutsalsa 1y ago
  There's are wooden escalators... Stairway to haven: Antwerp’s wooden escalators are among the last in use in the world -- https://www.belganewsagency.eu/stairway-to-haven-antwerps-wooden-escalators-are-among-the-last-in-use-in-the-world https://www.belganewsagency.eu/stairway-to-haven-antwerps-wo... How about wooden space escalators?!
Youden 1y ago
A YouTuber reproduced the process: https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM (The original process is documented in the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476) I suspect the issue with the other use-cases you mentioned is that it's very rigid. It isn't at all ductile or bendable the way steel is. It would either need to be pressed directly into the shape you need during manufacturing or pressed into a large piece of raw stock then subtractively processed to get the shape you need. Pressing might be economic for standard profiles like beams but it won't be for pieces like the chassis of a car. To be clear, "pressing" here doesn't just mean a standard hydraulic press, the press also needs to be heated and the wood needs to be held under pressure for a while. You can't just stamp it the way you can with steel panels.
- worthless-trash 1y ago
  Could you imagine how nice it would be to have the wood pressed into a single panel like like the tesla gigapress. I realise that it would have its drawbacks, but that wood paneling would look sublime.
  - rafaelmn 1y ago
    "How do I make EVs more flammable ?" On the flip side at least when they catch on fire they will probably burn cleaner ?
    - mensetmanusman 1y ago
      EVs are 10x less flammable than ICEs, so the wood would help bridge the gap.
      - wizzwizz4 1y ago
        Are you sure EV batteries are less flammable than diesel?
    - PaulRobinson 1y ago
vogu66 1y ago
I looked up the numbers in the original paper a little (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476) I don't know much about materials science, but I had a few classes about it. Seems like their wood gets ~550 MPa in ultimate strength in tension. Seems like their material is brittle (so it behaves like a spring until it breaks), therefore you probably want a safety margin, because at 550 MPa it breaks. Note the unit is a Force/Area, you can compare materials with the same cross-section. In compression they say it's about 160 MPa in axial load, it can be more or less in the other directions (due to wood having fiber it's not the same in all directions, and there they compress it perpendicular to the fiber so they get one direction stronger than the axial load and one weaker, but I guess for a beam you mostly care about axial strength). Torsion and flexion are directly dependent on compression, shear and tension, didn't find shear. Although I'm not entirely sure how it works for materials that aren't the same in all three directions like steel. For steel, depends on the steel but a quick search (https://www.steelconstruction.info/Steel_material_properties https://www.steelconstruction.info/Steel_material_properties and https://eurocodeapplied.com/design/en1993/steel-design-properties https://eurocodeapplied.com/design/en1993/steel-design-prope...) says ~200 to 400 MPa in tension for yield, at which point it starts changing shape instead of behaving like a spring, then 350 to 550 MPa for strength, at which point it breaks. I believe in multiple applications they do go apply forces where the metal bends a bit and adapts to its application, but I'm not sure. Regardless, that would mean the wood in tension is equivalent to very strong (presumably very expensive) steel. In compression, steel is from 170 to 370 MPa apparently(https://blog.redguard.com/compressive-strength-of-steel https://blog.redguard.com/compressive-strength-of-steel, didn't find much else easily because numbers were strange on other sources), so I guess steel would win on that one. But this is comparing the raw strength. In reinforced concrete, you add the metal for tension resistance, concrete is there to sustain compression, so it wouldn't matter much. For beams, the shape of beams is optimised to resist in the direction it needs (e.g. the H cross-section resists to bending in one direction). But you probably can't do that with their wood (they say for now they are limited in shapes), so you'd need more material, and probably it would be stronger overall since you have more material. Question then is how much material (in weight, compared to steel) do you need (they say 10 times less but it probably doesn't take into account the shape), and how much does it cost? I'm guessing they could also make composite beams at some points too, with not only wood in them. Then for mechanical applications, there might be also other things that enter the game. In their paper they needed to coat the wood so it wouldn't swell with humidity. For any application with friction, not great. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more sensitive to friction than metals. Note that the numbers are from 2018, they may have improved the process.
CrimsonCape 1y ago
I work in the industry and forsee the drawback being the price and the market. To buy any kind of "engineered" wood the most cost-effective options will be parallel strand lumber followed by glue-laminated lumber. This product is going to be extremely expensive and will not complete with existing engineered woods.

The_SamminAter 1y ago

From a quick read, this appears to be referring to the same process as was used by NileRed in their video about making bulletproof wood (https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM). It should be interesting to tool around with when it hits store shelves.

jchw 1y ago
That video was my first thought when I heard about this a few days ago. I always wondered how it was possible to make wood this strong yet it seemingly had no use cases. Maybe it's finally about to find some real world use cases.
Llamamoe 1y ago
Another video from a different YouTuber: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VC4d5iai3GE https://youtube.com/watch?v=VC4d5iai3GE

relyks 1y ago

This is awesome, but will it be cheaper than steel to produce and build with? Will it be cost effective in the long run in terms of maintenance?

pasc1878 1y ago
Does it take less power and other resources to make?
bobthepanda 1y ago
https://www.cesolutionsinc.com/blog/2019/11/20-advantages-clt-concrete-steel-cpcd5 https://www.cesolutionsinc.com/blog/2019/11/20-advantages-cl... CLT is often faster because you can essentially just prefab it offsite and assemble it significantly faster and with less equipment and specialized workers than reinforced concrete. Steel needs steelworkers, plus concrete takes time to set and cannot be poured in all weather conditions. While this isn't CLT I would imagine you still get most of the benefits (you can cut it to spec offsite and don't have to do anything special with it when it shows up)
- kragen 1y ago
  CLT is apparently "cross-laminated timber", which would work as a description of plywood but I'm sure is meant to indicate something different.
  - bobthepanda 1y ago
    They're similar but CLT is much thicker and can withstand stronger forces; strength to weight wise, it is better than steel.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
Does it rely on glues, epoxies, or other chemical processes? It's kind of moot if the resulting product causes more emissions or is not reusable, bio-degradable or at the very least chemically inert, like steel is (citation needed). If all of that isn't true, it's just aesthetics. (most of what I know about this is from a video about making bamboo 'wood' products, which involves a lot of glue)

mschild 1y ago

This is not the first article I have read about it. Throughout all of them, though, one main question I still could not find an answer to is: stronger than which steel? HSLA, carbon, rebar? Other than that, I'm all for it. We're renovating our house currently and made some structural changes. Would've loved to exchange some load-bearing steel beams with wooden ones so we could even leave them exposed as a design element.

tapia 1y ago
You can probably do that already without this material. Glued laminated timber is already a pretty good material for such cases.
- mschild 1y ago
  Absolutely, its unfortunately just a matter of cost. To get an equally sized wood beam that could support the weight, its almost 5x the price. Even factoring in other materials and labour.
  - kragen 1y ago
    Are you saying that wood is 5× the price of steel, or that glu-lam is 5× the price of wood?
    - mschild 1y ago
      The total cost of replacement as quoted to me by contractors is 5x. I've reached out to several and none of the quotes go below it. I'm doing a lot of things myself, but anything that can get dangerous or wildly expensive when I fuck it up I let skilled contractors handle.
      - kragen 1y ago
        That's even less clear. The total cost of replacing what with what is 5× what? I think what you want to remove is steel beams, but I'm not even sure of that.

acyclic0 1y ago

Similar, this company builds wind turbine monopiles from wood https://modvion.com/ https://modvion.com/

Gravityloss 1y ago

This is cool. On the other hand, maybe somebody could build a tracker for these technological announcements and things that come out after a few years. Batteries are another fascinating one. Here's one source of data: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=stronger+than+steel https://hn.algolia.com/?q=stronger+than+steel

ars 1y ago
I saw a tip once to do a Google News search on it, add a saved search and let Google email you if anything new comes up. Make sure to use good keywords so you don't get false positive hits on the subject.
LoganDark 1y ago
> On the other hand, maybe somebody could build a tracker for these technological announcements and things that come out after a few years. I've sort of had the opposite idea in my head for a while (many years): I wish there were a site that only talks about stuff that's already released and available to consumers. I don't want any future promises, I don't want any pre-orders, I don't want any announcements for products that will only come out in months to years, not even supposed scientific advancements that haven't even resulted in any product yet and may never[0]. I want only stuff that's available right now already. Hearing about future stuff has only ever made me feel worse. I want to just stop hearing about the future altogether. I wish promises and pre-announcements and whatever just didn't exist. [0]: https://xkcd.com/678 https://xkcd.com/678

JonChesterfield 1y ago

The process sketch in the linked article is soak wood in some unspecified chemicals for a while then compress it (claimed by a factor of 4). Wood is ~400/500 kg/m3 so taken at face value I guess that gives ~1800kg/m3. Pretty much where carbon fibre falls. I'd expect it to be done at elevated temperature too. I think I'd expect that to work. It's not going to be better than steel, as steel is amazing for a wide range of reasons, but for something in the domain of marine ply / other engineered timber, sure.

liampulles 1y ago

Wood can be cut to size on site and composed together with nails and screws. Steel can be welded. I wonder what one does with "Superwood"...

senectus1 1y ago
you make pretty structural beams >Ultimately, InventWood is planning to use wood chips to create structural beams of any dimension that won’t need finishing. “Imagine your I-beams look like this,” Lau said, holding up a sample of Superwood. “They’re beautiful, like walnut, ipe. These are the natural colors. We haven’t stained any of this.”
gwbas1c 1y ago
Cut it before it's treated? At least for residential, wood-framed houses, the framing material is delivered pre-cut. Even roofing beams are pre-assembled and delivered in triangles to the construction site. I'm sure someone can figure out a program that takes a CAD design and plans all the cuts.

oulipo 1y ago

Interesting, they mention that it's more carbon-efficient than steel and concrete, but they don't give an estimate of the energy required to produce such material?

kragen 1y ago
Maybe they mean if you make it with solar energy.
floatrock 1y ago
This is the most interesting question. The process involves boiling and pressing, both pretty energy-dense processes. Maybe not as energy intensive as an arc furnace, but would be curious to know how much less.

Chilinot 1y ago

This seems to be the research behind it: https://www.fpl.fs.usda.gov/documnts/pdf2018/fpl_2018_song001.pdf https://www.fpl.fs.usda.gov/documnts/pdf2018/fpl_2018_song00... And there are only smaller comparisons towards steel. They are more focused on how it compares to regular wood. In summary, what they are doing: 1. Boil the wood. 2. Press the wood. 3. Done.

kragen 1y ago
Liangbing Hu at UMD, checks out. Fantastic find! This should at least be the top comment on this thread to offset the content-free journalist pablum that's linked. The strength is 483–587 MPa, I seem to see when skimming, which is indeed superior to ASTM A36 structural steel (250MPa yield strength). In Extended Data Figure 1c, they reported the density as 1.3g/cc, a sixth of the density of steel. (Extended data figure 2f plots density against lignin removal percentage.) Of course high-strength steels are stronger, but not six times stronger. As for the process, they didn't just boil the wood; they boiled it with lye (2.5M, the "food industry chemical") and sodium sulfite (0.4M, technically also a food industry chemical, used for example as an antioxidant in wine) for 7 hours before densifying it with 5MPa for "about a day", removing optimally 45% of the lignin. This is similar to the sulfite chemical wood pulping process that preceded the Kraft paper process, just carried out at high pH and not taken to completion, so in a sense I guess the result is sort of like Masonite, which is also made from cellulose fibers from wood bonded with the wood's natural lignin. Environmental concerns may be an obstacle; sulfite pulping is nasty. Also presumably to mass-produce the stuff they'll want to find ways to shorten the cycle time, and maybe already have. The burning question that arises in my mind is why nobody was doing this in 01890, 135 years ago. Sulfite pulping was going gangbusters, building materials were booming, environmental concerns were largely unknown, and there was a rage for everything newfangled, modern, and "scientific". The scientific discipline of strength of materials, needed to calculate the benefits, was already well developed. Mason put Masonite into mass production in 01929, with a process involving autoclaving wood chips at 2800kPa. So what prevented someone from selling Superwood back then? Did nobody try partial alkaline sulfite pulping and pressing the result?
- calmbonsai 1y ago

eigart 1y ago

If this could save material used for construction, that would be great! Maybe (touring) skis could be a good application for this? Would be fun if somebody tried it.

TomWhitwell 1y ago

Seems like a larger format version of Lignilock wooden nails https://www.beck-fastening.com/en/innovation/lignoloc https://www.beck-fastening.com/en/innovation/lignoloc

Daub 1y ago
When I lived on a farm in wales, we would occasionally discover in our fields something called bog oak. This was trunks of oak placed in the ground by ancient farmers to drain a field. Over the centuries this had become semi-fossilized and in the process had become very strong. From high quality bog oak, it is possible to make wooden rings as strong as metal. Our bog oak was not so good (I tried) but certainly good enough for super strong dowels and suchlike.

sverhagen 1y ago

Anyone can comment on this? Just reading this article, and not bothered by any relevant knowledge here, I'm scared that they're turning "harmless" wood into some sort of super product that is hard to break down later for recycling? Like how we did a nice job switching from Styrofoam to paper cups, except they now have a plastic liner that makes the paper hard or impossible to recycle? Or how I wonder what the city recycling is going to do with those "wooden" kitchen cabinets that I dropped off, that are completely covered in a plastic finish?

Arn_Thor 1y ago
Not sure the point is to recycle it but rather to have a more carbon friendly alternative to steel. It would also have the benefit of making us less reliant on steel in places where wood supply is ample.
- nandomrumber 1y ago
  It's entirely possibly to make steel with an electric arc furnace powered by your choice of energy input. And steel is 100% recyclable, indefinitely. Hard to beat.
  - Arn_Thor 1y ago
    Sure but the infrastructure required to do that is probably (my guess) more extensive than a wood press and some chemicals
  - jdblair 1y ago
    “your choice of energy input” is carrying a lot of weight in your statement. producing steel from iron ore is extremely energy intensive. it’s true that once produced, recycling steel is less expensive. but steel doesn’t store carbon (except the small carbon input used to turn iron to steel) wood, on the other hand, is a carbon sink.
    - KSteffensen 1y ago

nikolay 1y ago

Metals could be molded unlike wood.

LoganDark 1y ago
Wood can be pressed
- nikolay 1y ago
  This is pressed wood already, but it can't be pressed in random shapes.

a1371 1y ago

My local forestery product association already claims that per unit of weight, wood is stronger than steel. We are seeing taller and taller high rises going up with mass timber. The idea here holds merit and has been attempted before. The video below is a great watch about "bulletproof wood". This company however is using it for the facade of the building not the structure, which is kind of a yellow flag. Many fancy headquarter buildings are after some novelty to show off. Facade is not a reliable market unless they can somehow integrate their wood into curtain wall systems and other high wind load applications. https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM?si=LhVQnWZfMyw_wssH https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM?si=LhVQnWZfMyw_wssH

rob74 1y ago
I assume that their first product is for facades because it was easier to get an approval for it? But eventually they want to expand into structural elements too.
Hilift 1y ago
Ipe (Brazilian Walnut or Ironwood) has excellent resistance to penetration for standard lead rounds. It's super-dense and fire resistant. The process for InventWood seems like it is re-creating something similar. Ipe is actually not attractive for exterior structures. The wood is so dense, stains don't penetrate. Many let it age to a grey/brown patina with annual cleaning and sanding. Inventwood would be a better alternative for exterior work if they have coloring options during the manufacturing process. For Ipe, staining is expensive and time consuming due to it has to be stained like cabinetry, with two passes.

LoganDark 1y ago

Is there any statement on the resistance of this treated wood to dry rot? It's cool that it's stronger, but if I were say building a house out of this stuff, I would want to know if it's more difficult for fungus to break it down.

jauntywundrkind 1y ago
Wild guess but I'd imaging it's probably quite resistant to many forms of rot and decay. There's no molecular space left for anything to work it's way in, to intrude.

webprofusion 1y ago

Cool. Conventional hardwoods can be pretty unfriendly to wood working tools, I wonder what the requirements are for cutting and drilling this stuff.

55555 1y ago

I dated a girl who did this as a science project in high school a decade ago. This has been around for decades. Does anyone know why it is not actually used?

meindnoch 1y ago

Define "stronger"

rishflab 1y ago

does anyone know if densified wood can be used as exterior cladding? Does it handle moisture/sun etc well?

sebstefan 1y ago

If I remember correctly these things bend under compression in a brittle way

fcanesin 1y ago

Does anyone know if extensive genetic editing for construction wood optimization has been tried? Some planted forests have no food chain role whatsoever (like Eucalyptus in Brazil) so this seems super safe high reward endeavor.

wahern 1y ago
Genetically modified (GM) eucalyptus is apparently actually growing in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_tree#Accelerated_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_tree#Acce... Still ongoing as of 2024: https://www.futuragene.com/releases/futuragene-receives-approval-for-first-ever-genetically-modified-eucalyptus-with-triple-stacked-traits-from-the-brazilian-national-biosafety-technical-commission/ https://www.futuragene.com/releases/futuragene-receives-appr...

eric-p7 1y ago

Anyone else ready for wooden space ships?

AStonesThrow 1y ago
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/jaxas-first-wooden-satellite-deploys-from-space-station/ https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/jaxas-first-wooden-satell...
JofArnold 1y ago
One of my first jobs (~1999) was as a research assistant working on seeing whether it's possible to make reentry vehicle heat shields from oak. Sadly, it wasn't.

api 1y ago

Wild question: could you use this for things other than construction? Like aviation? Wooden rockets? Cars?

griffiths 1y ago
or ships, specifically sailboats? I would like to know if this would be a more viable material than what is currently used.

elif 1y ago

Stronger than steel... I guess you won't be nailing it, I guess you'd have to prefab parts so you could drill through with like a carbide endmill since, unlike steel, you can't just use a magnetic drill like you would for field drilling holes.

elif 1y ago
On second thought, while that makes it less practical for western construction, this material would be extremely suitable for Japanese framing methods.
- timdiggerm 1y ago
  Do they not use saws?
  - elif 1y ago
    They actually use mostly chisels, but my point is that every cut in every structural member is done custom by hand at the warehouse in advance. i.e. where tooling is most flexible
AngryData 1y ago
Im willing to bet steel drill bits in a hand drill will still drill through it, it will just take longer like if you were drilling a notoriously hard wood like hickory. In practice you might need to actually go with smaller pilot holes and work up to bigger bit, rather than the average contractor method of jamming a half inch drill bit directly into some pine and forcing it through. But its not like anyone who regularly drills holes doesn't know that denser or harder materials need to be drilled with progressively increasing drill bit sizes.
mrits 1y ago
I'd imagine you'd use it for load bearing. This would mean a lot of the only framing could be cheaper and easier wood to work with.
perlgeek 1y ago

AngryData 1y ago

I think the only real problem is compressing wood this way is not fast and you end up spending near as much or more on this compressed wood than you would on many other materials. I still think it has uses but this isn't some new miraculous tech that's going to take over everything and replace stuff like steel which is pretty damn cheap. Wood in its natural form already has some of the highest strength-to-weight ratios compared to non-exotic materials, but it does still has drawbacks. I am curious how much grain structure effects compressed wood's strength, because with traditional wood you have to either very carefully select your pieces and avoid knots in bad areas, or just super over-build a structure so that no single points are ever a failure point. Like a stud-framed house can use garbage wood because it really only needs like 1/3 of the studs to be a stable structure, the other 2/3rds are just convenience for nailing things to it and in being able to use crappy lumber without any skill or knowledge and still end up with a safe and stable structure. Versus something like a timber frame where there are critical beams holding things up that you don't want a big gnarly knot in the middle of a span.

ethbr1 1y ago
Thankfully, lumber has developed not-imprecise grading methods that are tied into guaranteed load values that are tied into architectural plans (which themselves include safety margins). Basics: https://www.southernpine.com/grading-methods/ https://www.southernpine.com/grading-methods/ and https://bof.fire.ca.gov/media/llad34j2/full-14-b-presentation-structural-lumber-grading-basics-july-2021.pdf https://bof.fire.ca.gov/media/llad34j2/full-14-b-presentatio... Examples: https://www.nelma.org/the-grade-rule-book/ https://www.nelma.org/the-grade-rule-book/ and https://nlga.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/NLGA-GR-2022-version-__Website-Pages-1-238.pdf https://nlga.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/NLGA-GR-2022-ver...

IshKebab 1y ago

> The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better. This sounds a bit implausible implausible. Steel is insanely strong, especially high strength steels, can be over 1000 MPa. Here's the original paper: http://lit.umd.edu/publications/TengLi-Pub91-Nature-2018.pdf http://lit.umd.edu/publications/TengLi-Pub91-Nature-2018.pdf > The densified wood demonstrates a record high tensile strength of 587 MPa. Yeah... ok it's 50% stronger than very low strength steel. I think there are other problems comparing it with steel. Steel isotropic; wood is only strong in one direction. Steel has really nice and safe ductile failure modes that wood doesn't. Iron mining is not great for the environment but I doubt hardwood production is either, and steel can be easily recycled. Seems like a great product but it feels like slightly disingenuous positioning.

monicaaa 1y ago

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rco8786 1y ago

This feels like kind of a big deal? How expensive is it?

smusamashah 1y ago

If floor and walls were made of this and you fall on it, will it hit and hurt like steel or wood? Their website [1] shows house built of this wood. [1] https://www.inventwood.com/ https://www.inventwood.com/

stevage 1y ago

I really really hope more companies get into this space. The amount of carbon to be saved by replacing concrete with something else is gargantuan.

thelastgallon 1y ago

Can we build shipping containers from this wood? It should insulate better and may let us build better shipping container homes.

omer9 1y ago

Nile Red did it on youtube... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CglNRNrMFGM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CglNRNrMFGM

lofatdairy 1y ago
It's a good video. He based his work on / followed the protocol described in the Nature paper published by the lab mentioned in the article (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476).
mml 1y ago
I've seen this video, he did a pretty good job, but his chemical treatment didn't penetrate at all. I suspect he would have benefitted from pressure cooker during that step. this is how treated lumber is treated to get full penetration of whatever chemicals they use. given the depth the of the penetration, he basically case hardened it. you can see in the bullet tests that the interior laminations are much fatter than the exterior layers.

deadbabe 1y ago

Steel is not that strong to begin with, its strength is often overestimated.

nothercastle 1y ago

All to get around regulations for building with steel structures. In the USA it’s way easier to permit wood than steel

fnord77 1y ago

Can it be used as the frame of a skyscraper? Can it be used to construct a cargo ship?

peatmoss 1y ago

I keep hoping to see advancements in lab grown wood beyond what was reported a few years ago. My dream is enormous sheets of plywood with many layers of fibers all with ideal orientations, grown at sea on barges, taking up growing nutrients and e.g. fire retardant minerals from sea water. The barges would cross the equator seasonally to maximize sunlight.

kayodelycaon 1y ago
I’m honestly curious, what makes this better than farming pine trees?
- literalAardvark 1y ago
  The fact that it's a wonderful example of a silicon valley solution That and the maximised sunlight
- chillingeffect 1y ago
  Pine trees specifically are low quality wood. Key issues with natural wood generally are warping due to humidity and misaligned fibres, strength, rot.
  - gtowey 1y ago
    That's a silly statement. Pine is well suited to its use, otherwise, well, we wouldn't use it! It's by a massive margin, the most common lumber used in construction. Its strength and other properties are well understood and all you have to do is follow the specifications and it performs great. I mean what would even be the advantage to using other woods for home construction? Using a "stronger" wood means what? You can make your structural members smaller than 2x4? What would be the point? Walls need space for insulation and wires and pipes, there's no good reason to use a more dense wood. And it would still be more expensive! Pine is perfect for what it does because it meets the practical and engineering needs at the least expensive price.
    - 1y ago

Hasz 1y ago

IMO, they should be going after the hardwood flooring market. LVP, engineered hardwood and laminate are all OK, but you could sell this as real wood that is just as durable as LVP. Especially given some of the samples look like teak, ipe, walnut etc, and those species make beautiful but expensive floors. No pricing mentioned though, perhaps it is too expensive.

mathgradthrow 1y ago
I want flex in my hardwood flooring. Making hardwood that is basically as hard as concrete sort of defeats the point.
- Hasz 1y ago
  You can make a product that is resistant to indentation and scratches while still providing give under your foot. LVP achieves this with various underlayments, the same technique could be used here.
thatnerd 1y ago
Yes, the pricing is what I'm curious about. If they were saying "we can make this for half the price of steel," then the world steel market becomes their growth target. If they can't get cheaper than steel, if they can't compete with steel, they'll probably never be more than a niche product.

jppope 1y ago

While we're talking wood... does anyone know the process to produce the following "paperwood" material (https://www.core77.com/posts/109646/Plywood-Laminations-So-Pretty-You-Wont-Want-to-Edge-Band-It https://www.core77.com/posts/109646/Plywood-Laminations-So-P...) I'm assuming its wood veneer with a colored stain on some layers

rapestinians 1y ago

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matthewaveryusa 1y ago

I can't find any information on whether or not a table/miter saw or drill would be able to cut/drill through this material

kazinator 1y ago

Kevlar, another organic material with a tensile strength greater than steel, also derives its strength from hydrogen bonds between chains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevlar#Structure_and_properties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevlar#Structure_and_propertie...

moneywoes 1y ago

could this lead to multi-story Wood condos

mikewarot 1y ago

I wonder if it could be used to make machine tools. The wood grain structure that remains should be inhomogeneous enough to dampen vibration, and the treatment should make it dimensionally stable, so that it might be better than cast-iron for machine beds, frames, etc. It's possible that this could replace 1950s and 1960s US made cast iron as the best possible material for large machine tools. (Lathes, mills, jig borers, etc.)

mppm 1y ago

For all those who are peeved by "stronger than steel" claims: No it's not. Or only in an extremely specific, not very practically relevant way. Their Nature paper [1] has the details, but let me summarize: Tensile strength along the fiber direction is up to 600 MPa, which is higher than mild steel used for ordinary construction (~400 MPa). Except that mild steel is isotropic and highly ductile, i.e. it will deform by 50% or so before finally breaking, while the densified wood will snap as soon as its strength is exceeded. There are also steel grades that are way, way stronger than mild construction steel. Flexural and compressive strength is up to half as high (300 MPa, below mild steel). Strength in the weakest direction (across fibers) is around 50 MPa, or 1/8 of mild steel. This densified wood is essentially a rather weak fiber composite. With careful planning it can be used instead of steel in construction, but their marketing is simply BS. 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476

whiddershins 1y ago

I'd be curious about the total carbon emissions, all in, to produce this because it seems like an excellent carbon sink. And especially when compared to steel.

gwbas1c 1y ago

> Ultimately, InventWood is planning to use wood chips to create structural beams of any dimension that won’t need finishing. “Imagine your I-beams look like this,” Lau said, holding up a sample of Superwood. “They’re beautiful, like walnut, ipe. These are the natural colors. We haven’t stained any of this.” Show the [beep]ing picture!

downboots 1y ago
"The company treats it with 'food industry' chemicals"
rented_mule 1y ago
The picture at the top of the article appears representative of the surface appearance: https://www.inventwood.com/superwood-beams https://www.inventwood.com/superwood-beams
- bjt 1y ago
  I know it's practically cliche to say so these days, but that picture is giving strong AI vibes. Look at the joints between the big beams. If you needed beams that large to hold up a building, you wouldn't cut them in the middle like that. And you wouldn't have those gaps. Plus, all the text on the page is future tense, talking about what the super wood beams will be able to do. So I don't know how much that picture really represents what the wood will look like.
  - MichaelDickens 1y ago
    I'm almost positive it's AI generated. Look at the chairs at the kitchen island in the background. No human would draw chairs that look like that. The picture at https://www.inventwood.com/superwood-facade https://www.inventwood.com/superwood-facade also looks AI-generated. The fact that they're using AI images on their landing pages does not give me confidence in the quality of the product.
    - SubiculumCode 1y ago

thomasjudge 1y ago

What's the cost?

tantalor 1y ago
For high load applications, steel is already cheaper than wood, so to compete with steel, not only would this new fancy technology have to be stronger, but also cheaper. That's probably why they are leaning in towards sustainability and aesthetics instead. They likely can't compete on cost.

qiine 1y ago

so wood rocket when ?

gdubs 1y ago
Japan did launch a wooden satellite recently!

Ericson2314 1y ago

This sounds very great, but also is probably a smaller incremental step from the engineered "mass timber" already in use, especially in Europe, Incremental step is good news for me --- makes this making it out of the lab more credible!

idontwantthis 1y ago

Would this be a good material for aviation?

fho 1y ago

I wonder if the alternative to wood is just... wood. Anecdotal, but I've been to Finnland last year and I couldn't help but see a correlation between (a) big swaths of land are covered in trees and (b) a lot of housing is build with wood. It's honestly somewhat impressive to see huge structural elements build from what is basically a single glue-up. So I assume that it's not actually about "wood stronger than steel", but more about (local) availability and/or logistics.

beached_whale 1y ago

This sounds a lot like engineered wood beams that have been around for a while. See it used for joists

thasso 1y ago

What’s the limit on how much wood we can produce? I hear people say using wood is good for carbon capture, but trees take a lot of time to grow, no? If we started using 2x to 10x the amount of wood as we did before, wouldn’t we deplete our stock of trees?

zhynn 1y ago

Aren't the solvents pretty nasty chemicals? I wonder how they deal with the sodium hydroxide + sodium sulfate saturated with lignin and hemicellulose... maybe it can be turned into a soap or glue? That sounds like a rough biproduct to have to deal with. I guess those aren't as nasty as I thought, lye and sodium sulfate are pretty innocuous. It's probably much less difficult to deal with than plastic byproducts.

thuanao 1y ago
As it is now, wood pulp and waste products are recycled into plywood and wood composites by binding them with glues and resins. This process allows us to take the wood pulp and produce wood beams and boards without using the glues and resins. With the added benefit that it's even stronger than existing wood composites. If I understand correctly this process enables recycling wood pulp and waste with less inputs and less environment impact.

throwaway173738 1y ago

Are they touting how pretty it looks because it won’t hold stain or varnish well afterwards? What kind of paint and primer would you use? A lot of how a coating performs depends on the structure of the material. If it’s rot, uv and insect resistant that would be a benefit here too.

jajko 1y ago
For those who don't even bother reading those few lines in article: > Class A fire rated, or highly resistant to flame, and resistant to rot and pests.

kylehotchkiss 1y ago

Would be cool if they mass-produce this material enough to frame houses with it. Intrinsic termite resistance could actually allow houses in the southwest to last 100 years. And reduce CA's massive greenhouse gas impact from all the vikane https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-04-03/california-is-biggest-us-emitter-of-this-greenhouse-gas https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-04-03/califor... > The termite killing gas — sulfuryl fluoride — has been found to be 4,800 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat. > When a team of Johns Hopkins scientists set out to map exactly where the gas was being released, they were startled to find that California generated as much as 12% of global emissions of the synthetic fumigant.

turtlebits 1y ago
Houses can already can last 100 years+ with proper waterproofing/building techniques and standard lumber. There are plenty of ways to mitigate termites.

hacker_88 1y ago

Future coal material

deleted 1y ago

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anArbitraryOne 1y ago

Seems like a high-end façade