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IKEA could not be reached for comment.

 

Processing bulk natural wood into a high-performance structural material

Jianwei Song, Chaoji Chen, Shuze Zhu, Mingwei Zhu, Jiaqi Dai, Upamanyu Ray, Yiju Li, Yudi Kuang, Yongfeng Li, Yonggang Yao, Amy Gong, Ulrich H. Leiste, Hugh A. Bruck, J. Y. Zhu, Azhar Vellore, Heng Li, Marilyn L. Minus, Zheng Jia, Ashlie Martini, Teng Li & Liangbing Hu
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). Natural wood is a low-cost and abundant material and has been used for millennia as a structural material for building and furniture construction. 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, ammonia or cold rolling 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. Our two-step process 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. Our processed wood has a specific strength higher than that of most structural metals and alloys, making it a low-cost, high-performance, lightweight alternative.
[...]

 

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476.epdf?referrer_access_token=DOwdrMaE3Rkn2H5rsxaLkdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PCy5i9Q4zwaBEuUCd3sS813LXBjDXn2ACr9k5d7uM5UUF1J_98a4-VSKlKd2oLwD0z7F0CTIADzHxOp8LvlqCYf_LBbCHoMg6SuXMFZ9Up1PTPZ8U2xnKlutHL1xp7M4GYYZ7ErKhLq-b1kDlyKc5bDqxzsmLuFUlD_HMmxGNxzQRVOhIsOA1S_mtaKso1MsYBDbW2kQKWfZ6PBS-ZJxtIb87BXXpvkFiCv8Iqhd_jTg%3D%3D&tracking_referrer=www.spiegel.de

 

Local experts have wondered why the authors mention the swelling from humidity, since apparently that can be mostly rectified in existing processes of densificating wood.

Posted (edited)

Thank you! This is interesting (though not $200 worth of interesting .. I'll wait for it to surface elsewhere).

 

Even without such treatment, hardwoods such as Poplar offer desirable mechanical characteristics. Untreated Poplar has a flexural strength / density ratio somewhat higher than mild steel, and a much higher stiffness due to its greater depth for equal weight. Lousy resilience and ballistic resistance, though.

 

I'm eager to learn more about this, particularly what the densification does to its stiffness and the degree of ballistic resistance improvement.

Edited by TTK Ciar

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