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Crushed wood is stronger than steel
111–120 of 180 posts
Re: Crushed wood is stronger than steel
#112"...eco-friendly alternative to using plastics and metals..."
Would someone be able to explain to me why metal isn't "eco-friendly"? I understand that some plastics degrade into small, unfriendly particles over time (and others can't be recycled), but I always thought that metals were fairly easy to recycle with a very high recovery rate.
Re: Crushed wood is stronger than steel
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
none of those ever made it to very high levels of industrial adoption. Non-exotic methods of strengthening wood, made it to high levels of production in spades: plywood, oriented strand board, microlam and glulam beams, and medium density fiber board (MDF) are direct examples. Wood I-joists and plate connected wood trusses are less direct. From a functional standpoint, standardization of lumber grades is a social tec…
There’s also stabilized wood. You basically fill all the space inside the wood with a hard resin. Small pieces are used for things like jewelry, knife scales, etc.
At what point do we have to stop considering processed wood as wood, but as a wood/resin or wood/adhesive composite?
Re: Crushed wood is stronger than steel
#114I'm guessing this material has more compressive strength but less tensile strength than steel? If so, how could you replace steel with compressed wood as the title implies? They're totally different materials from a mechanical engineer's point of view.
Re: Crushed wood is stronger than steel
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
>making it effectively thinner, lighter and stronger at the same time. The article never says it's lighter, and the paper is behind a paywall. Interesting process none the less.
It does say it is lighter, it says it removes certain compounds from the wood and then compresses the remainder without further additives. So it is lighter than the original wood but much more dense.
I mean I agree it's likely that the process makes the wood lighter. But no, the article doesn't explicitly say the end result is lighter. It explicitly says it's thinner and stronger.
I don't really know much about the process or whether the chemical treatment can potentially make the wood heavier/absorb some of the liquid, which would offset the weight of the material that's lost.
My point wasn't that there's no way the result is lighter. My point was that the article didn't mention the weight before and after, so it seemed presumptuous to me to claim it was definitely lighter.
I went to check the actual paper to confirm, hit a paywall, and so was unable to verify. I was hoping someone would comment with more details.
Re: Crushed wood is stronger than steel
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry to go on a tangent, but your comment reminded me of a book I read about the Chinese culinary culture pre-revolution. Chinese chefs had, and may still have, wooden cutting boards that were conditioned somehow such that they were as hard as stone. (There was also an implication that they resisted bacteria unlike normal wood boards when not scoured properly.) These boards were passed down from generation to genera…
Doesn't having a cutting board as hard as stone defeat the purpose of having a cutting board?
My guess is that these wood boards would have much less friction than a stone equivalent, unless you had enough money to pay for a polished one.
Re: Crushed wood is stronger than steel
#117The most expensive wooden floors have the end grain exposed facing upwards and this is then compressed down, much like the top of a good quality butchers block. Those floors are just about indestructible. The heavier such floors are used the stronger they get! The wood in the article is compressed crosswise to the grain (so they get thinner rather than shorter), using the original planks as the raw organic material t…
none of those ever made it to very high levels of industrial adoption. Non-exotic methods of strengthening wood, made it to high levels of production in spades: plywood, oriented strand board, microlam and glulam beams, and medium density fiber board (MDF) are direct examples. Wood I-joists and plate connected wood trusses are less direct. From a functional standpoint, standardization of lumber grades is a social tec…
Yep, plywood gets a bad rap: it's incredibly strong stuff. Aircraft plywood can be used to build entire aircraft, marine plywood can withstand harsh weather conditions for years, and birch or hardwood plywood can look very pretty.
Re: Crushed wood is stronger than steel
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s also stabilized wood. You basically fill all the space inside the wood with a hard resin. Small pieces are used for things like jewelry, knife scales, etc.
At what point do we have to stop considering processed wood as wood, but as a wood/resin or wood/adhesive composite?
Sometime after we stop considering processed food as food, but a food/sugar or food/preservative composite.
Re: Crushed wood is stronger than steel
#119"...eco-friendly alternative to using plastics and metals..." Would someone be able to explain to me why metal isn't "eco-friendly"? I understand that some plastics degrade into small, unfriendly particles over time (and others can't be recycled), but I always thought that metals were fairly easy to recycle with a very high recovery rate.
Maybe they're harder to harvest from the Earth -- costs more resources per unit to mine than logging?
Re: Crushed wood is stronger than steel
#120Scientific American has more gee-whiz details: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stronger-than-ste...
(I'm totally unqualified to parse between the articles' potential uninformed optimism and fellow commenters' skepticisms)