Processing bulk natural wood into a high-performance structural material

It's hardly "regular wood" though, as the structure mentioned was constructed using a specific kind of engineered compressed wood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InventWood > In 2018, [Liangbing] Hu's laboratory reported that partially removing lignin from natural wood and then compressing the remaining cellulose under heat produced a material roughly three times denser than the original timber and an order of magnitude stronger in bending and tension.[2] The material was commercially named Superwood. > [2]: https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fnature25476 | https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476

It's a good video. He based his work on / followed the protocol described in the Nature paper published by the lab mentioned in the article (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476).

This seems to be the original research paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 [edit: whoops, it's the same paper] "First, natural wood blocks were immersed in a boiling aqueous solution of mixed 2.5 M NaOH and 0.4 M Na2SO3 for 7 h, followed by immersion in boiling deionized water several times to remove the chemicals. Next, the wood blocks were pressed at 100 °C under a pressure of about 5 MPa for about 1 day to obtain the densified wood" Pretty simple and straightforward.

If you follow the link from the article [1], then there's an abstract that describes the process. It sounds like they boil the wood with sodium hydroxide and sodium sulphite, then heat and compress the wood, which somehow leads to better alignment (and/or linking?) of the cellulose polymers. I don't know what the implications are for recyclability, but there's no mention of injecting other materials so perhaps it decomposes in a similar way to ordinary wood? [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476

A YouTuber reproduced the process: https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM (The original process is documented in the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476) I suspect the issue with the other use-cases you mentioned is that it's very rigid. It isn't at all ductile or bendable the way steel is. It would either need to be pressed directly into the shape you need during manufacturing or pressed into a large piece of raw stock then subtractively processed to get the shape you need. Pressing might be economic for standard profiles like beams but it won't be for pieces like the chassis of a car. To be clear, "pressing" here doesn't just mean a standard hydraulic press, the press also needs to be heated and the wood needs to be held under pressure for a while. You can't just stamp it the way you can with steel panels.

We already have the technology to build net zero carbon buildings. But the building trade is both notoriously conservative and extremely effective at lobbying to protect their profits (at least in the UK). Superinsulated, almost airtight houses with ground and air source heat pumps and solar PV should be mandatory, as should banning of all in home boilers in new builds. That’s all easily achievable even without some of the recent novel inventions such as engineered wood: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 We have to stop treating the atmosphere as a free line of credit with no limit that we can just dump all our externalities into, or we’ll find out very soon that there is no such thing as an externality at planetary scale. We’re all in the same hermetically sealed box, breathing each other’s farts. Sorry for the rant. It’s hard to stop once the despair creeps in.

The story does make a lot of references to previous work done, and even has a quote about how this method seems expensive and no better than existing methods. It looks like the paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476) provides the detail you are looking for.

The paper is behind a pay wall, but their figures and extended data stuff is free to view here: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476#extended-data They say that their ultimate tensile strength of their material is ~600 MPa. Steel ranges from 250-2500 MPa.