151–160 of 282 posts
Of course I cannot access the full text article, but the claim that this HW can be sharpened and become "3 times sharper" than "most commercial table knives" sounds not very scientific.
I'm sold. Where can I get some of this hardened wood? I would like to experiment with it and maybe incorporate it into products.
This won't provide the same density this study has achieved, but it'll give you a quick proof-of concept for next to no cost.
In the article I believe they also chemically alter the wood by removing lignin with a boiling sodium hydroxide solution. Basically dissolving out the 'dead weight' and leaving more cellulose, which is what's giving wood most of its strength.
They do also use physical compression under heat, which wouldn't be too hard to achieve with mere run to home-depot, but I'm not sure how much effort you want to put into this as of now.
Wood is renewable when you can grow it, cut it up into useful shapes, then at the end of its useful life, compost it. As soon as you add a shit load of processing and plastic and other stuff it's not "wood" anymore than gasoline is a dead dinosaur. As for things like plywood that use glue for the laminations...glue is the most expensive and important part of the product. Not the wood so much. Replacing steel? I don't…
Why are people not considering just growing large trees to capture carbon cut down those trees and just coat them in plastic and throw them at the bottom of ocean/desert or some kind of storage where this carbon can stay trapped for thousands of years ? What am I missing ? I think growing trees is better than just capturing CO2 directly as growing a large forest might have other advantages and a lot of wood can be us…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This kind of thinking is why cryptocurrency miners are setting up shop at substations. They get severely discounted electricity from the utilities, in exchange for ramping up and down their servers to keep the grid load balanced. Except, of course, cryptocurrency isn't nearly as useful as, say, desalinated water.
> Except, of course, cryptocurrency isn't nearly as useful as, say, desalinated water. I'd like to expand on this a bit. The major problem with cryptocurrency is that the value of a typical coin seems to be ~ the cost of electricity needed to mine one. This means that a crypto miner turns $1 of energy into ~$1 of wealth. As far as business plans go, this is an absolutely horrific use of energy. Nearly no other busine…
Everyone who buys the coins are just helping to remove the pandemic stimulus from the economy, which I suppose is its own sort of good.
Wood is renewable when you can grow it, cut it up into useful shapes, then at the end of its useful life, compost it. As soon as you add a shit load of processing and plastic and other stuff it's not "wood" anymore than gasoline is a dead dinosaur. As for things like plywood that use glue for the laminations...glue is the most expensive and important part of the product. Not the wood so much. Replacing steel? I don't…
Steel is amazing - and as a result we use it in all kinds of places where its properties aren't fully utilized. Aluminum has been growing into that role of "steel alternative", but there's still room for other alternatives.
There is a new Titanium process, not as cheap as I would like, but a lot better than we have now. https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-021-00166-8
Wood is renewable when you can grow it, cut it up into useful shapes, then at the end of its useful life, compost it. As soon as you add a shit load of processing and plastic and other stuff it's not "wood" anymore than gasoline is a dead dinosaur. As for things like plywood that use glue for the laminations...glue is the most expensive and important part of the product. Not the wood so much. Replacing steel? I don't…
Steel doesn't pull carbon out of the air, unfortunately.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition progress making steel with a lot less CO2, by using hydrogen (and other techniques) instead of coal has come a long way. This isn't just pie in the sky, the world's second largest steel maker plans to reduce CO2 by 30% before 2030. [1] And of course steel is eminently recyclable. I'm not against wood but steel has some good long term attributes as well. [1] https://corporate.arcelormittal.com/sustainabili…
You can also coke iron with carbon from plastic. It's still not super great. But it does reuse plastics which don't get recycled enough.
I've been intrigued for a while about various modified wood technologies (eg hardened wood, transparent wood), but I'm always disappointed because it usually ends up just being a minor support structure for a very non-wood material (generally epoxy). This one shows a compression step, so maybe it's different, but I'd really like more info on whether this is actually renewable or sustainable in any interesting sense.…
Well, the glue is a renewable resource, old livestock and milk. That's why Borden used mascot Elsie's spouse Elmer as a glue mascot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_glue https://americacomesalive.com/elmers-glue-the-surprising-sto...
Wood is renewable when you can grow it, cut it up into useful shapes, then at the end of its useful life, compost it. As soon as you add a shit load of processing and plastic and other stuff it's not "wood" anymore than gasoline is a dead dinosaur. As for things like plywood that use glue for the laminations...glue is the most expensive and important part of the product. Not the wood so much. Replacing steel? I don't…