Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic • Hacker News Board

Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic

#211

Post by logical_proof » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 12:50 AM UTC

contravariant wrote: post #198

whiddershins wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I can’t tell if 20 million trees is a lot or a little.

The amount of effort required for 10 million trees a day would require everyone in the US to plant a tree each month. This would likely also require people to care for enough saplings to plant a new tree each month. It's not an insurmountable level of effort per person, but if you try to do it on a large scale you inevitably end up with logistical problems, and it would require quite a lot of space.

I am not sure I understand your math here. Let’s say every adult in the US, 300M, plants a tree each month for 12 months, 3.6B trees planted in a year. Or are you factoring in saplings that fail to grow or something? Is it that bad that for every 160 trees planted only one survives?

Edit: strike that I see what you meant there with the a day. I just should have actually read what you wrote before I commented.

Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic

#212

Post by potatoman22 » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 12:52 AM UTC

politician wrote: post #210

gremloni wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah seriously, bury the plastic really deep away from water tables and forget about it. We clearly can’t recycle most of the stuff. Couple that with moving away from a frivolous use of plastic and I think we are golden. There are a bunch of abandoned mines miles away from substantial water tables. Fill those up.

We can’t figure out how to store a minimal quantity of radioactive waste in a purpose-built salt mine dozens of miles away from any small town. I have no faith that we can find places to store megatons of plastic waste.

Plastic doesn't radiate.

Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic

#213

Post by aurizon » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:02 AM UTC

zardo wrote: post #200

aurizon wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking back at Aluminium, it was once very costly - there was no economical way to extract it from clay by traditional metallurgy. When the Hall process of electrolytic extraction from molten salts was invented = huge price decline, and useage. Titanium is in a similar position, fairly common, but hard to extract economically. I hope there is a low cost electrolytic to recover Titanium found some day, as it is a ver…

>Looking back at Aluminium, it was once very costly - there was no economical way to extract it from clay by traditional metallurgy. Supposedly Napoleon III had aluminum tableware for his most honored guests, and gold for everyone else.

Yes, It was very hard to liberate Aluminum from oxygen with his level of chemistry...

Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic

#214

Post by short12 » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:05 AM UTC

reissbaker wrote: post #209

megameter wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wood itself is sustainable, but in making a choice of building materials, we're also looking for total embedded energy cost and impact of the final product. Traditional buildings from a century ago relied on the harvest of old-growth wood with denser rings than the new sustainable forestry, and they were built with fewer features - when built well they didn't fail, but they weren't targeting high energy performance,…

Curious to see some data on these claims. Yes, glue is often made out of "chemicals" — but plastic also is. Is the total environmental cost of plastic lower than wood? Besides, you're not going to frame a house with plastic: it's steel and concrete, vs wood. AFAIK plastic doesn't enter the equation here.

We ready use plastic in decks. I bet it can be further scaled up. At what cost I have no idea though. But I wouldn't count it out as a primary building material

Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic

#215

Post by tiluha » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:18 AM UTC

huntertwo wrote: post #206

entropicgravity wrote: post #78

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…

How do they make hydrogen clean? 95% of hydrogen comes from burning fossil fuels. I doubt they're going through electrolysis to make the hydrogen or sourcing it from a supplier that does.

The variable nature of most renewable energy sources might make hydrogen produced by electrolysis cheap enough

Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic

#216

Post by anon_cow1111 » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:27 AM UTC

symby wrote: post #174

anon_cow1111 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a tiny bit of advice I might be able to lend here, for experimentation purposes mainly. Regular hardwood can be heat-treated to increase its density and compression strength considerably, in the most basic form this can be done at home by heating it... slowly ... up to ~400F (typically just holding it over a hot-plate until it's light-medium brown. You'll want a temperature-stable oven for wood more than a cm…

Yeah... I don't want to make this stuff, I want to use this stuff. It would be great to get an understanding of its performance specs. I may be able to specify hardened wood in place of steel, aluminum, magnesium machined parts in high-end ecologically conscious consumer products... but not without some understanding of the engineering specifications and a source of material.

My best guess would be to contact someone from the study group directly via email and ask about obtaining an engineering sample for a potential commercial product (no really, they'll probably appreciate it). At this point the wood is likely still being produced in situ (i.e. a few guys making it in a phys/chem lab). The more interest is shown to them, the more likely they are to start looking at contracting the process out, thus making material easier to obtain and lower cost.

From what I've read, I'd expect it to behave similarly (in yield/toughness/hardness) to cast aluminum but with a tendency to split along the grain still, for machining purposes. So fairly hard, but not super ductile. The density will be in the same ballpark as magnesium if my math is right.

But... 'ecologically conscious' won't mean anything until production can be scaled up. When you're measuring things in raw carbon-footprint, it won't be able to break even with recycled pop cans merely due to the low-quantity batches they're processing now. It could be viable in mass production based on a previous article I read in Nature. The process seems simple enough that I could replicate it in my garage with some effort, so I think there's some potential there. It's just a question of whether it can beat traditional metals economically, with a slight edge in aesthetic appeal for your high-end customers.

Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic

#217

Post by ehnto » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

huntertwo wrote: post #206

entropicgravity wrote: post #78

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…

How do they make hydrogen clean? 95% of hydrogen comes from burning fossil fuels. I doubt they're going through electrolysis to make the hydrogen or sourcing it from a supplier that does.

It's part of the ongoing process, we can't skip to the final step. I think it is fair to rely on electricity and assume it will at least one day be green when thinking about green processes in totality, since some places are already generating green electricity. In my city we have a hydrogen plant powered mostly y solar that is feeding the steel mill, and this is just the beginning of exploring this process so it is bound to get more efficient.

Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic

#218

Post by carapace » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

icedistilled wrote: post #116

beambot wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Species matters, but so does availability. Lignum vitae is an endangered species, so it's not really a renewable alternative at the scale humanity requires.

fun fact, you can grow Lignum Vitae in SoCal in certain areas, not just in Florida. San Diego would probably grow lignum vitae well because it seems to like the random humid weeks in Los Angeles and just exists for the rest of the year

Do you know anyone who has Lignum Vitae seeds or seedlings for sale or trade?

Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic

#219

Post by burnished » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:47 AM UTC

gnabgib wrote: post #135

xxs wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

magnesium is sort of a more expensive version of al.

In that it's one electron from it (like Silicon)? Magnesium is 2.2x stronger, 1.08x harder, and 2.05x more costly, 0.65x as thermally conductive and, 0.64x as dense. Think I'm missing your similarity metric

What do you do that the differences between magnesium and aluminum are noteworthy in casual conversation? Machining?

Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic

#220

Post by burnished » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:50 AM UTC

mensetmanusman wrote: post #103

EGreg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention all that carbon released when the wood decomposes - no ?

No, not all carbon is released as gas during decomposition. If it were, we wouldn’t have diamonds :)

I don't know enough about diamond formation to properly dispute this, but I thought they didn't form from organic, locally sourced carbon?