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This seems to be the research behind it: https://www.fpl.fs.usda.gov/documnts/pdf2018/fpl_2018_song00...

And there are only smaller comparisons towards steel. They are more focused on how it compares to regular wood.

In summary, what they are doing: 1. Boil the wood. 2. Press the wood. 3. Done.

This is not the first article I have read about it. Throughout all of them, though, one main question I still could not find an answer to is: stronger than which steel? HSLA, carbon, rebar?

Other than that, I'm all for it. We're renovating our house currently and made some structural changes. Would've loved to exchange some load-bearing steel beams with wooden ones so we could even leave them exposed as a design element.

> Ultimately, InventWood is planning to use wood chips to create structural beams of any dimension that won’t need finishing. “Imagine your I-beams look like this,” Lau said, holding up a sample of Superwood. “They’re beautiful, like walnut, ipe. These are the natural colors. We haven’t stained any of this.”

Show the [beep]ing picture!

Nile Red did it on youtube... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CglNRNrMFGM

Anyone can comment on this? Just reading this article, and not bothered by any relevant knowledge here, I'm scared that they're turning "harmless" wood into some sort of super product that is hard to break down later for recycling? Like how we did a nice job switching from Styrofoam to paper cups, except they now have a plastic liner that makes the paper hard or impossible to recycle? Or how I wonder what the city recycling is going to do with those "wooden" kitchen cabinets that I dropped off, that are completely covered in a plastic finish?

From a quick read, this appears to be referring to the same process as was used by NileRed in their video about making bulletproof wood (https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM). It should be interesting to tool around with when it hits store shelves.

It matches marketing hype, but they seem to have a timeline of this summer. Does anyone know the drawbacks of this material?

> The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better ...

Maybe torsional, compression, flex, etc. strength isn't so good?

Otherwise, why focus on the construction industry? How about airplanes? Cars and trucks?

I keep hoping to see advancements in lab grown wood beyond what was reported a few years ago. My dream is enormous sheets of plywood with many layers of fibers all with ideal orientations, grown at sea on barges, taking up growing nutrients and e.g. fire retardant minerals from sea water. The barges would cross the equator seasonally to maximize sunlight.

Stronger than steel... I guess you won't be nailing it, I guess you'd have to prefab parts so you could drill through with like a carbide endmill since, unlike steel, you can't just use a magnetic drill like you would for field drilling holes.

This is cool. On the other hand, maybe somebody could build a tracker for these technological announcements and things that come out after a few years. Batteries are another fascinating one.

Here's one source of data: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=stronger+than+steel

My local forestery product association already claims that per unit of weight, wood is stronger than steel. We are seeing taller and taller high rises going up with mass timber.

The idea here holds merit and has been attempted before. The video below is a great watch about "bulletproof wood".

This company however is using it for the facade of the building not the structure, which is kind of a yellow flag. Many fancy headquarter buildings are after some novelty to show off. Facade is not a reliable market unless they can somehow integrate their wood into curtain wall systems and other high wind load applications.

https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM?si=LhVQnWZfMyw_wssH

Similar, this company builds wind turbine monopiles from wood https://modvion.com/

Interesting, they mention that it's more carbon-efficient than steel and concrete, but they don't give an estimate of the energy required to produce such material?

For all those who are peeved by "stronger than steel" claims: No it's not. Or only in an extremely specific, not very practically relevant way. Their Nature paper [1] has the details, but let me summarize:

Tensile strength along the fiber direction is up to 600 MPa, which is higher than mild steel used for ordinary construction (~400 MPa). Except that mild steel is isotropic and highly ductile, i.e. it will deform by 50% or so before finally breaking, while the densified wood will snap as soon as its strength is exceeded. There are also steel grades that are way, way stronger than mild construction steel.

Flexural and compressive strength is up to half as high (300 MPa, below mild steel).

Strength in the weakest direction (across fibers) is around 50 MPa, or 1/8 of mild steel.

This densified wood is essentially a rather weak fiber composite. With careful planning it can be used instead of steel in construction, but their marketing is simply BS.

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476

Seems like a larger format version of Lignilock wooden nails https://www.beck-fastening.com/en/innovation/lignoloc

I think the only real problem is compressing wood this way is not fast and you end up spending near as much or more on this compressed wood than you would on many other materials. I still think it has uses but this isn't some new miraculous tech that's going to take over everything and replace stuff like steel which is pretty damn cheap. Wood in its natural form already has some of the highest strength-to-weight ratios compared to non-exotic materials, but it does still has drawbacks.

I am curious how much grain structure effects compressed wood's strength, because with traditional wood you have to either very carefully select your pieces and avoid knots in bad areas, or just super over-build a structure so that no single points are ever a failure point. Like a stud-framed house can use garbage wood because it really only needs like 1/3 of the studs to be a stable structure, the other 2/3rds are just convenience for nailing things to it and in being able to use crappy lumber without any skill or knowledge and still end up with a safe and stable structure. Versus something like a timber frame where there are critical beams holding things up that you don't want a big gnarly knot in the middle of a span.

While we're talking wood... does anyone know the process to produce the following "paperwood" material (https://www.core77.com/posts/109646/Plywood-Laminations-So-P...)

I'm assuming its wood veneer with a colored stain on some layers

I wonder if it could be used to make machine tools. The wood grain structure that remains should be inhomogeneous enough to dampen vibration, and the treatment should make it dimensionally stable, so that it might be better than cast-iron for machine beds, frames, etc.

It's possible that this could replace 1950s and 1960s US made cast iron as the best possible material for large machine tools. (Lathes, mills, jig borers, etc.)

This is awesome, but will it be cheaper than steel to produce and build with? Will it be cost effective in the long run in terms of maintenance?

Wood can be cut to size on site and composed together with nails and screws. Steel can be welded. I wonder what one does with "Superwood"...

Steel is not that strong to begin with, its strength is often overestimated.

Would be cool if they mass-produce this material enough to frame houses with it. Intrinsic termite resistance could actually allow houses in the southwest to last 100 years. And reduce CA's massive greenhouse gas impact from all the vikane https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-04-03/califor...

> The termite killing gas — sulfuryl fluoride — has been found to be 4,800 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat.

> When a team of Johns Hopkins scientists set out to map exactly where the gas was being released, they were startled to find that California generated as much as 12% of global emissions of the synthetic fumigant.

What’s the limit on how much wood we can produce? I hear people say using wood is good for carbon capture, but trees take a lot of time to grow, no? If we started using 2x to 10x the amount of wood as we did before, wouldn’t we deplete our stock of trees?

If floor and walls were made of this and you fall on it, will it hit and hurt like steel or wood?

Their website [1] shows house built of this wood.

[1] https://www.inventwood.com/

Does anyone know if extensive genetic editing for construction wood optimization has been tried? Some planted forests have no food chain role whatsoever (like Eucalyptus in Brazil) so this seems super safe high reward endeavor.

The process sketch in the linked article is soak wood in some unspecified chemicals for a while then compress it (claimed by a factor of 4). Wood is ~400/500 kg/m3 so taken at face value I guess that gives ~1800kg/m3. Pretty much where carbon fibre falls. I'd expect it to be done at elevated temperature too.

I think I'd expect that to work. It's not going to be better than steel, as steel is amazing for a wide range of reasons, but for something in the domain of marine ply / other engineered timber, sure.

I wonder if the alternative to wood is just... wood.

Anecdotal, but I've been to Finnland last year and I couldn't help but see a correlation between (a) big swaths of land are covered in trees and (b) a lot of housing is build with wood.

It's honestly somewhat impressive to see huge structural elements build from what is basically a single glue-up.

So I assume that it's not actually about "wood stronger than steel", but more about (local) availability and/or logistics.

If this could save material used for construction, that would be great!

Maybe (touring) skis could be a good application for this? Would be fun if somebody tried it.

IMO, they should be going after the hardwood flooring market. LVP, engineered hardwood and laminate are all OK, but you could sell this as real wood that is just as durable as LVP. Especially given some of the samples look like teak, ipe, walnut etc, and those species make beautiful but expensive floors.

No pricing mentioned though, perhaps it is too expensive.

> The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better.

This sounds a bit implausible implausible. Steel is insanely strong, especially high strength steels, can be over 1000 MPa.

Here's the original paper:

http://lit.umd.edu/publications/TengLi-Pub91-Nature-2018.pdf

> The densified wood demonstrates a record high tensile strength of 587 MPa.

Yeah... ok it's 50% stronger than very low strength steel.

I think there are other problems comparing it with steel. Steel isotropic; wood is only strong in one direction. Steel has really nice and safe ductile failure modes that wood doesn't. Iron mining is not great for the environment but I doubt hardwood production is either, and steel can be easily recycled.

Seems like a great product but it feels like slightly disingenuous positioning.

Aren't the solvents pretty nasty chemicals? I wonder how they deal with the sodium hydroxide + sodium sulfate saturated with lignin and hemicellulose... maybe it can be turned into a soap or glue? That sounds like a rough biproduct to have to deal with.

I guess those aren't as nasty as I thought, lye and sodium sulfate are pretty innocuous.

It's probably much less difficult to deal with than plastic byproducts.

Kevlar, another organic material with a tensile strength greater than steel, also derives its strength from hydrogen bonds between chains:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevlar#Structure_and_propertie...

I dated a girl who did this as a science project in high school a decade ago. This has been around for decades. Does anyone know why it is not actually used?

Is there any statement on the resistance of this treated wood to dry rot? It's cool that it's stronger, but if I were say building a house out of this stuff, I would want to know if it's more difficult for fungus to break it down.

What's the cost?

I'd be curious about the total carbon emissions, all in, to produce this because it seems like an excellent carbon sink. And especially when compared to steel.

This feels like kind of a big deal? How expensive is it?

This sounds very great, but also is probably a smaller incremental step from the engineered "mass timber" already in use, especially in Europe,

Incremental step is good news for me --- makes this making it out of the lab more credible!

Cool. Conventional hardwoods can be pretty unfriendly to wood working tools, I wonder what the requirements are for cutting and drilling this stuff.

I really really hope more companies get into this space. The amount of carbon to be saved by replacing concrete with something else is gargantuan.

I can't find any information on whether or not a table/miter saw or drill would be able to cut/drill through this material

Can we build shipping containers from this wood? It should insulate better and may let us build better shipping container homes.

All to get around regulations for building with steel structures. In the USA it’s way easier to permit wood than steel

This sounds a lot like engineered wood beams that have been around for a while. See it used for joists

Are they touting how pretty it looks because it won’t hold stain or varnish well afterwards? What kind of paint and primer would you use? A lot of how a coating performs depends on the structure of the material. If it’s rot, uv and insect resistant that would be a benefit here too.

Would this be a good material for aviation?

Wild question: could you use this for things other than construction? Like aviation? Wooden rockets? Cars?

Can it be used as the frame of a skyscraper?

Can it be used to construct a cargo ship?

does anyone know if densified wood can be used as exterior cladding? Does it handle moisture/sun etc well?

If I remember correctly these things bend under compression in a brittle way

Anyone else ready for wooden space ships?

Future coal material

could this lead to multi-story Wood condos

Seems like a high-end façade

so wood rocket when ?

Define "stronger"

Metals could be molded unlike wood.