Patented by the University of Maryland, clear wood promises to be more sustainable, strong, and efficient than glass, although its uses have yet to be fully tested.
In recent years, thanks to an increasing focus on resource consumption and the environmental impacts of construction and material production processes, the use of wood have spread and the rapid development of technologies that allow its use in increasingly innovative and widespread ways, especially in structures. But if wood, sustainable and renewable material with natural opacity, turns transparent, could it become a glass substitute?
Research developed in the United States by the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland has been trying to answer this and other questions, carrying out experimental projects on materials with many possible implications in the laboratories of the college.
The starting point of the process for the production of transparent wood, which the university has also patented, is an action on lignin, the polymer that gives wood dark color, solidity, and resistance, making cell walls more rigid and that the connecting elements between cells, transport water, and nutrients to living sections.
The procedure is quite simple and is carried out in two steps: the first consists of boiling the material for approximately two hours (in the laboratories, we proceeded with 2 × 2 cm elements) in a solution of water, sodium hydroxide, and others. Chemicals capable of dissolving lignin in a material that is then soaked in epoxy resin to restore its strength and strength artificially. The result is a modified, reinforced, and almost completely transparent material, which was then tested in a small-scale model of a house where a transparent wood sample replaced one of the roof fins.
While the possible costs of such treatment are still unknown, there could be many potential advantages of a material whose disadvantages could only be brought to light by use as a whole, beginning with its incomplete transparency.
Starting from a completely natural transparent wood, even if it is, it is a material that promises to be more respectful with the environment and resistant than glass, compared to which it also has a greater insulating capacity. In fact, tests carried out in the laboratory have shown that the internal structure of the concentric rings sectioned by the cut, which the treatment leaves unaltered, allows the passage of almost all visible wavelengths, light and protects from infrared radiation carried by heat.
The same internal structure that makes the material more resistant to the passage of heat also creates a material with anti-glare characteristics that, in some situations, would make it more effective than the glass itself: the light radiation that passes through the material would be reflected internally in its thin and uniform section. This reflection would lead to the diffusion of the light instead of its direct passage, bringing inside a more uniform and freer distribution of the sun's position. This specific characteristic, if used, for example, in the coating of photovoltaic panels, according to the researchers, could lead to an increase of the order of 30% in the efficiency of the system, making its performance more autonomous from the angle of incidence of solar rays.
Despite treatment with epoxy resins and chemicals, transparent wood would be more ecological and sustainable than glass and plastic, produced from a totally renewable raw material and resistant up to ten times more than untreated wood.
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