A clear, strong, and thermally insulated wood for energy efficient windows

https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/10/01/transparent-wood-could-be-window-future

by bookofjoe • 6 years ago

99 47 6 years ago

usda.gov

bookofjoe• 6 years ago

A Clear, Strong, and Thermally Insulated Transparent Wood for Energy Efficient Windows

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.201907511

Transparent Wood Could Be the Window of the Future [U.S. Department of Agriculture]

https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/10/01/transparent-wood-...

jaclaz2• 6 years ago

Very interesting (as a new material).

It being not waterproof/waterresistant (unless painted) doesn't seem to make it a good glass replacement for windows, though.

Possibly as an inner pane(s) of sealed multi-pane windows (with traditional glass on the outside) as - also - since it can be cut with ordinary rotary tools, it probably is not scratch resistant.

The light weight seems to me like the most relevant feature.

tsomctl• 6 years ago

Or, have it sealed in the middle between two panes of glass, giving you water and abrasion protection. If you could glue it together, the glass can be super thin.

jaclaz2• 6 years ago

Or, have it sealed in the middle between two panes of glass

Yep, not much different from:

Possibly as an inner pane(s) of sealed multi-pane windows (with traditional glass on the outside)

I mean, what is the "Or,"?

tux19682• 6 years ago

It is approximately five times more thermally efficient than glass, cutting energy costs.

Seems even more useful than its weight. There is a lot of energy loss from the windows of buildings. Would be a huge gain if that can be brought down significantly.

centimeter• 6 years ago

It sounds like they’re comparing it to single pane glass, which is not what most windows are made of these days when thermal efficiency is a concern.

dirtnugget3• 6 years ago

You have to factor in the usual lifespan of glass as compared to this. A clean glass pane will resist water and ice for hundreds of years. This stuff will need to be repainted every few months to keep integrity.

japhyr• 6 years ago

Multi-pane windows are great thermally, but they need to be replaced when the seal breaks and they get filled with condensation. If this material addressed that issue, it might make longer-lasting multi-pane windows?

Tepix• 6 years ago

Not a big issue, they last for decades nowadays

dirtnugget3• 6 years ago

Older thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24666793

GuB-42• 6 years ago

The wood is oxidized in a special bleach bath and then penetrated with a synthetic polymer. The resulting material is not only virtually transparent, it acts more like plastic.

As someone commented in a previous thread, it is essentially wood fiber reinforced plastic. It would be interesting to compare it with other plastics commonly used instead of glass, like polycarbonate.

noja• 6 years ago

It sounds unrecyclable, and unreusable.

santoshalper• 6 years ago

Yeah, but to be fair, windows tend to be used in roles where they last a very long time.

izend• 6 years ago

Most material waste from a home renovation is tossed into the local dump. It is rare anything is salvaged.

eloff2• 6 years ago

Why would you need to recycle wood? It's biodegradable and cheap.

Recycling is overrated for cheap products. Plastic is practically impossible to recycle effectively. If it were made to be biodegradable that would make much more sense. But even failing that, there is no shortage of landfill space, as long as it goes to the garage and not to the environment - a huge problem in the developing world and where the plastic in the ocean originates from.

cultus• 6 years ago

Recycling wood products is actually quite environmentally unfriendly and produces inferior products. It really only makes sense to recycle glass.

gnufx4• 6 years ago

I wonder if this is the same material I've recently come across as transparent containers sauces and the window in cardboard packaging, which are supposed to be "industrially compostable".

maxerickson2• 6 years ago

Those are likely just plastics.

Some of them might be PVA (though water solubility isn't really a great feature for packaging).

gnufx4• 6 years ago

They say they're made from vegetable material (for the containers, I think) and wood for the window, but I don't know what that actually means, of course.

zanderz• 6 years ago

Cellulose films are supposed to be in this category but I've never understood how a consumer is supposed to distinguish it from plastic

gnufx4• 6 years ago

The recycling label, presumably.

kordlessagain• 6 years ago

I thought it was suppose to be transparent aluminum we got in the future. Scottie!

jkqwzsoo• 6 years ago

The thermal conductivity of the polymer is pretty close to the thermal conductivity of their window[0]. It looks like literally any fiber with an appropriately balanced fiber size v. refractive index difference would do the same job.

If you were going to support this between two panes of glass for waterproofing, you might as well just use the PVA and skip the wood, as it will likely be much cheaper eliminating the harvesting, rotary cutting, delignification, and impregnation steps. Or, you might even put nothing between the two panes of glass, since air is a good insulator as well.

[0] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.macromol.5b02477

nwah1• 6 years ago

Vacuum-insulated glass exists too. Better than air but trickier to work with.

anfilt• 6 years ago

Err plexy glass and similar materials have been around for quite some time. They have a major problem though. They scratch easily!

zaroth• 6 years ago

Glass production in construction also comes with a heavy carbon footprint. Manufacturing emissions are approximately 25,000 metric tons per year.

Actually I think it’s closer to 50 million tons (0.5 tons of CO2 per ton of product times 100m tons of flat glass per year).

Relatively we’re talking about ~0.1% of worldwide emissions. Glass production used to emit closer to 1.3tons/ton, but it’s gotten a lot more energy efficient over time.

riffraff• 6 years ago

there's a few videos from years ago attempting earlier versions of this[0]. In the end, it is very little "transparent wood" and more "plastic with wood bits in it".

[0] e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1H-323d838

TedDoesntTalk• 6 years ago

They don’t mention cost compared to glass?

ryanmarsh• 6 years ago

PVA fibers get weak when heated (read: typical Texas summer) I wonder how this will perform with the wood cellulose.

A clear, strong, and thermally insulated wood for energy efficient windows

Related Stories