TL9+ Wood [Ultratech]

[AlexanderHowl]

Originally Posted by malloyd

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.

From the recent reports, the laminated densified wood is as strong and tough as high quality steel at the same thickness, but it is 1/3 the mass and costs the same per mass (three times as much as steel of the same thickness). It is much much tougher than plastic because of the chemical and mechanical changes created by the process.