Inside America's mass timber movement

That's going to be a very contemporarily pretty airport.

I don't get the idea of an airport where people will just come to hang out as a community space because I'm thinking that's going to freak out a whole bunch of security folks, but in the long run that's not a materials question, so I'll leave that aside for now.

The mass timber movement seems to go back to basics, using bonded wood from supposedly sustainable forests to build gorgeous buildings. Here's to hoping that it works.

Transparent wood uses orange peel extract to go entirely sustainable

Source - phys.org

Transparent aluminum - famously from Star Trek IV and about which I have posted previously - is fairly well bunk. It's just a version of alumina.

Transparent wood, on the other hand, is a bit closer to being what its name purports to be.

It's wood from which one polymer - lignin - has been removed and replaced with another polymer. Depending on the replacing polymer, the final product 'wood' can have very different properties even becoming fairly transparent.

Original research publication - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202100559 

More populist article - https://phys.org/news/2019-11-transparent-wood-material-future.html 

A skilled amateur tries to recreate the experiment in his lab...

Why do Baseball Bats Break?

Oh, hey, Grady. Good to see you.

In this video - about why major league baseball saw a sharp uptick in broken bats (and subsequently an uptick of injuries caused by flying bat shards) in the early and mid-2000's - Grady gets into the differences in ash (the wood used to make almost every pre-2000 bat) and maple (a wood that became popular - not poplar - with ball players in the early 2000's after Barry Bonds used one to break the HR record).

He then goes into the non-isotropic nature of wood and how ash and maple are very different. I guess the lessons learned in making ash bats didn't translate cleanly into making maple bats. It doesn't mean that maple bats are inherently less safe, just that they need to be made - and particularly marked - differently than do ash bats.

Really, changing the material requires changing the production and use strategies for that object?

Who would've guessed it?

How The World Of Building Materials Is Responding To Climate Change

Source - https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/1/15/21058051/climate-change-building-materials-mass-timber-cross-laminated-clt 

I will readily admit that I can't stand Science Friday.

I'm an NPR guy all the way, and I'm a science geek. Science Friday should be right up my alley. It's like they've made a show just to hook me in. (It's like Newton's Apple - which I loved as a kid - for the radio.)

And then Ira Flatow comes on and asks inane questions like, "what's your favorite cephalopod?" or "what does alligator poop smell like?" of serious scientists trying to discuss their research. If it weren't for Ira, I might really love Science Friday.

Occasionally, though, the topic is interesting enough that I fight through my Ira-loathing and stay tuned to WVXU (my local NPR station, I'm a sustaining member, doncha know).

In late February, for example, there was a segment (thirty-three minutes long) about mass timber buildings (buildings with wooden structural members) titled How the World of Building Materials is Responding to Climate Change.

Increasing concerns with steel and concrete construction - both release huge amounts of carbon dioxide during the material's initial production - are leading people back toward building with wood - or some form of engineered wood-based products (laminates, particle composites, etc) as a way to avoid the carbon dioxide release from concrete and steel production.

Not that the concrete industry isn't fighting back.

The Chemarts Cookbook

From the ChemArts webpage, "[t]he CHEMARTS Cookbook offers both simple and more advanced ideas and recipes for hands-on experiments with wood-based materials. The book showcases interesting results, focusing on raw materials that are processed either chemically or mechanically from trees or other plants: cellulose fibres, micro- or nano-structured fibrils, cellulose derivatives, lignin, bark, and wood extractives."

ChemArts is a program at Aalto University in Finland pairing chemical engineering and art and design students to explore innovative uses for Finnish plant life (their words, from the video just below).



The program has published a 'cookbook' of sorts in which they provide recipes for 'cellulosic material exploration'. In other words, they have a bunch of recipes using cellulose derivatives from minimally processed materials like wood pulp to more processed ingredients like nanofibrillar cellulose, carboxymethyl cellulose, and microcrystalline cellulose along with fairly non-toxic materials like baking soda, calcium carbonate, glycerol, and starch.

The 'cookbook' is broken down with some basic science and ingredient background, methods and safety discussion, then the recipes themselves. The recipes are further classified as hard, soft, transparent, flexible, (3d) printed materials, colouring and dyeing, long fibres from nature, papermaking, and growing materials. The book then ends with some 'inspiration' projects that their students have made from the recipes in the book.

Some of the materials are going to require a bit of sourcing to manage, but the fact that they've published a recipe book for material science exploring sustainable, tree-based raw materials is spectacular.

The cookbook itself is available for €30.00 or as a free download pdf. You can check out some of the images from inside the 'cookbook' on this article (or they're all in the pdf.)

And, in case they make the free download disappear, I've uploaded the pdf to my Google Drive.

LignoLoc - Collated Wooden Nails

If I mention the word nails to you, what're your first thoughts?

If you're thinking of shiny, red, sparkly finger tips running up and down your arm, those aren't the right nails.

If you're thinking of steel slivers that hold things together, that's about what I'm talking about.

If you're thinking of wooden slivers that hold things together, then you're a big liar.

But apparently the LignoLoc people aren't liars, and they're thinking about wooden slivers holding wooden planks together.

How cool and environmentally friendly is that?

Actually, how environmentally friendly is that really? How many birch trees does it take to make a wooden nail?

Science Lowers Shattering Risk at Home Plate

Image source

From the New York Times...

Welington Castillo smashed a double for the Chicago Cubs late in a game in the 2010 season, his bat exploding on impact with the ball. A long shard of wood flew at a teammate, Tyler Colvin, sprinting home from third base, impaling him a few inches from his heart. Though Colvin scored, his season was over.

That's not Welington Castillo or Tyler Colvin there to the right. That's Hanley Ramirez breaking his bat in a game June 19, 2013. The video of the Tyler Colvin incident can be found on YouTube, though.

I grew up just a few miles from the Hillerich & Bradsby Louisville Slugger factory in Jeffersonville, Indiana, so I can vouch that we've been using wooden baseball bats since at least April, 1975 (and probably longer than that). It would seem like there wouldn't be much room for improvement in wooden bat technology. Sure there are composite bats and aluminum bats and carbon fiber bats, but those aren't for the big leagues. The big leaguers use wooden bats, and wood is wood. It grows, we cut it, we shape it.



In the early 2000's, however, traditional ash bats began to give way to maple bats, favored most famously by Barry Bonds. The maple bats felt harder, stronger, more powerful - perhaps truthfully, perhaps in an example of placebo effect. The important aspect for this article is that maple bats didn't just shatter; they exploded.

Hence the room for materials science, finding a way to make a better maple bat.