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Not a single mention in the article of their biggest downside, environmental costs.
> While composites might seem like a futuristic technology, in many ways, they hark back to millions of years of human and even pre-human material technology. Wood, after all, is the original composite material, as it’s composed of long and short fibers glued together by other substances—much like modern synthetic composites are often made up of carbon fiber held together by epoxy resins. Wood was a chief enabler of…
Not a single mention in the article of their biggest downside, environmental costs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Trees have to be big, strong, lightweight, and bendable. Homogeneous materials won't work for that application. Why wouldn't titanium work for that application? (Assume that somehow the plant can move nutrients and fluids around some other way.) Or even steel, as long as it's not solid? Obviously, nature can't produce hollow steel tubes, but lots of metals satisfy your requirement list here.
Trees did not evolve with bountiful access to titanium, but it would be interesting to ponder how they would have evolved on a metal planet
It overlaps a whole lot with the concept of a dyson trees, but the core problem is that it needs to be able to use the metal in the first place - earth is a metal planet, in the sense that ~10% of the planet is iron, and yet our trees are not steel.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not to nitpick too much, but while wood is "technically" a composite material made up of fiber embedded in lignin, I don't think it's very useful to include it under the broad category of composite materials. Engineered woods like plywood and cross-laminated timber definitely are, but it's more useful to classify regular wood as an organic raw material rather than a composite. Why would defining it as a raw materia…
Yea from a material science perspective, wood seems to obviously be a composite.
> Modern composites, starting with Bakelite
AFAIK Bakelite is a resin, not a composite.
No mention of fiberglass, which had been used for many decades before carbon fiber went into widespread use.
> composites—which are amalgamations of a variety of fibers, embedded in a variety of plastics
Steel reinforced concrete is a composite and doesn’t fit this definition.
> All of that is possible because composites, while they have their challenges, are often able to perform just as well as high-strength metal parts, but with a fraction of the weight. That's what Rush (who perished in the Titan submersible) also thought....
> While composites might seem like a futuristic technology, in many ways, they hark back to millions of years of human and even pre-human material technology. Wood, after all, is the original composite material, as it’s composed of long and short fibers glued together by other substances—much like modern synthetic composites are often made up of carbon fiber held together by epoxy resins. Wood was a chief enabler of…