Turning natural wood into a high-performance material with properties like steel

Synthetic structural materials with exceptional mechanical performance suffer from either large weight and adverse environmental impact (for example, steels and alloys) or complex manufacturing processes and thus high cost (for example, polymer-based and biomimetic composites)

PK-Techventures mission was to identify a substitute material to steel with similar properties but much lighter weight.

Natural wood wasn’t they first choice of findings, but we thought it’s interesting to share this accomplishment.

Wood is a low-cost and abundant material and has been used for millennia as a structural material for building and furniture construction9. However, the mechanical performance of natural wood (its strength and toughness) is unsatisfactory for many advanced engineering structures and applications.

Pre-treatment with steam, heat followed by densification has led to the enhanced mechanical performance of natural wood. However, the existing methods result in incomplete densification and lack dimensional stability, particularly in response to humid environments, and wood treated in these ways can expand and weaken.

Here we report a simple and effective strategy to transform bulk natural wood directly into a high-performance structural material with a more than tenfold increase in strength, toughness and ballistic resistance and with greater dimensional stability. The scientists developed a two-step process which involves the partial removal of lignin and hemicellulose from the natural wood via a boiling process in an aqueous mixture of NaOH and Na2SO3?followed by hot-pressing, leading to the total collapse of cell walls and the complete densification of the natural wood with highly aligned cellulose nanofibres.

This strategy is shown to be universally effective for various species of wood. The processed wood has a specific strength higher than that of most structural metals and alloys, making it a low-cost, high-performance, lightweight alternative.

As a result of this conversion, the treated wood could move up into the league of high-tech materials. Because with its tear resistance and stability it not only competes with many metals - it is also significantly lighter than them. "That makes our treated wood an inexpensive, high-performance and lightweight alternative for such materials and could be used in cars, airplanes and buildings - anywhere that steel is used today."

This is an example of finding the missing link, filling the GAP to support innovation projects to succeed.

https://fit-for-growth.pk-techventures.com