TL9+ Wood [Ultratech]

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

So, I just read an article in Scientific American about how scientists have figured out how to increase the strength of wood by 50x (making it as strong as carbon fibers) by a process that triples its density at 5% to cost of making carbon fibers. It is called densified wood. What types of applications do you think an advanced society would use densified wood for?

Probably not very much. Those numbers are nonsense (or I suppose more charitably measured against some particularly unimpressive wood, it comes in a lot of varieties). The best case for densified wood is you remove everything but the cellulose and collapse that to a solid block - which of course gives you the same properties as a block of a cellulose plastic. That's not a new material, but generally hasn't found many applications.

What people are actually hoping for from densified wood is that it will be cheap. Cellulose bioplastics are on the more expensive end of plastics, if they were dirt cheap, they probably would have more applications, not as wonder materials but for the same kind of large scale applications we see other cheap materials (like say wood, or concrete, or mild steel) used for.