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Wood Pulp Extract Stronger Than Carbon Fiber Or Kevlar
Zothecula writes "The Forest Products Laboratory of the US Forest Service has opened a US$1.7 million pilot plant for the production of cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) from wood by-products materials such as wood chips and sawdust. Prepared properly, CNCs are stronger and stiffer than Kevlar or carbon fibers, so that putting CNC into composite materials results in high strength, low weight products. In addition, the cost of CNCs is less than ten percent of the cost of Kevlar fiber or carbon fiber. These qualities have attracted the interest of the military for use in lightweight armor and ballistic glass (CNCs are transparent), as well as companies in the automotive, aerospace, electronics, consumer products, and medical industries."
Who needs transparent aluminum when you've got transparent, bulletproof wood?
I *knew* I should have patented the paper armor I made for myself when I was a kid.
Ezekiel 23:20
Transparent aluminum is ballistics-resistant so much so that it doesn't even scratch. It's also much more expensive.
Yeah, but its barter value isn't very high. A guy I know (Monty) only got a few big sheets of plexi in exchange for the transparent aluminum formula. Sheesh.
One of the biggest problems with building a race car/truck is often the cost of the materials. The stiffer frames built from carbon fiber are insanely expensive. Imagine if we could build a frame out of this for around the cost of steel --the technology could then be used in ordinary cars, with a huge weight savings, and a safer, stronger frame. It could revolutionize the automotive design industry.
So does this mean that Ikea furniture will now be bullet proof too?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Wood armor - we're back to the medieval days!
As with most (all?) engineered wood products - what about when it gets wet?
From TFA:
Swelling introduces a large number of nano-defects in the cellulose structure. Although there is little swelling of a single CNC, water can penetrate into amorphous cellulose with ease, pushing apart the individual cellulose molecules in those regions. In addition, the bonds and interfaces between neighboring CNC will be disrupted, thereby significantly reducing the strength of any material reinforced with CNCs. To make matters worse, water can move easily over the surface/interfaces of the CNCs, thereby allowing water to penetrate far into a composite containing CNCs.
They suggest painting it. To be honest, I'm a skeptic. We wore body armor during my time in Iraq, and the abuse that our gear received cannot be overstated. Rain, heat, jumping over walls, dealing with mud. No thanks, I'll stick with Kevlar.
Material, Elastic Modulus, Tensile Strength
CNC, 150 GPa, 7.5 GPa
Kevlar 49, 125 GPa, 3.5 GPa
Carbon fiber, 150 GPa, 3.5 GPa
Carbon nanotubes, 300 GPa, 20 GPa
So a great compromise material when you take cost into account, if it comes to fruition.
Uh, at least in the US and Canada the trees used for making pulp come from forests owned by the paper companies and they sure as hell replant them when they harvest. Mead Westvaco (as an example) has a fairly long term view of things, they own 3M acres and process them in a fashion that minimizes the amount of land they have to purchase to meet demand. The only bad thing about timber harvesting is that there's no old growth forests, but those were cut down generations ago and have little to nothing to do with modern forestry practices.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Transparent aluminum is ballistics-resistant so much so that it doesn't even scratch. It's also much more expensive.
Yeah, but its barter value isn't very high. A guy I know (Monty) only got a few big sheets of plexi in exchange for the transparent aluminum formula. Sheesh.
Yeah, I heard some hospital patient grew a new kidney, too, but got run down months later by someone driving a car made of transparent aluminum, never saw it coming.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
In the future, there will be a Legend of Zelda game where the Wooden Shield will be the best shield, rather than the starting shield.
Actually they generally don't do that, because one blight or beetle means they lose an entire plot for many years, plus their plants will have varying needs and having the cutting crews constantly moving equipment to meet demand is inefficient. Christmas tree farms are a different animal, there the trees are planted and harvested in a handful of years and the harvest season is very short so making things as monoculture as possible is seen as an advantage (plus if you lose a crop your downtime is significantly less).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Current body armor (and I'm talking about the Interceptor vest, MTV (Modular Tactical Vest) and the Plate Carrier) don't have anything to do with the word "flexibility". The armor plates (Small Arms Protective Inserts, or SAPI) are stiff; they're slightly contoured, the front being the same contour as the back, which makes sense if you're disfigured I suppose...I digress...
Since current vests don't provide flexibility at all, then the CNC being stiffer won't have much of an effect. It will, however, be wonderful to save on weight, those vests get cumbersome fast. But those are ceramic. Replacing those would be much more effective than replacing the Kevlar, I would think, in terms of weight-saving.
The Kevlar itself is light enough (disclaimer: I was an infantry machine gunner), it's the SAPI plates that were/are horrible to deal with.
I'm always thinking of Batman's suit.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
How is this different than fields of wheat or corn?
Do they not have any process to prevent competition?
They don't damage the soil the same way... but yeah, they're pretty bad too.
For a smarter way, I'd suggest checking out Geoff Lawton's DVD "Establishing a Food Forest the Permaculture Way". You can view some decent excerpts searching Youtube for the term "Lawton's Guide To Permaculture Design and Strategy"
Food forests are complex and thus not friendly to automation, so it's not a profitable way for one man to establish himself as the gatekeeper to the cupboards of a million of his fellows.
However, they're less expensive in terms of materials, produce significantly more food in the same space, require no maintenance, and once they're built, they can and have lasted thousands of years.
Example: 300 year old food forest in Vietnam
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ZgzwoQ-ao
Example: 2000 year old food forest in Morocco
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hftgWcD-1Nw
I used his principles when designing a border of perennial food-bearing plants to protect our local urban garden society site from hungry homeless people. Now instead of raiding peoples personal plots, they feed themselves from the edge and go on their merry way. I'm determined to leave an oasis to my children when I die, and hope to be able to get the land and get started with the labour in the next couple of years.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
This will require some years of development, but it certainly shows promise.
The strength and stiffness of a fiber are not the performance we'll directly obtain from the materials. It's more like a potential number. Typical 'carbon fiber' products have on the order of 60%-75% fiber and 40%-30% plastic by volume, where epoxy is one of the most common plastics. The carbon fibers contribute strength and stiffness, but it would fracture easily with a rigid binder. The softer plastic binder acts to share and redistribute loading efficiently (after some fibers break) to keep the carbon fibers more or less all carrying load effectively.
They'll have to go experiment until they find which plastics work well with this. That took a long time for composites since if the plastic binds too strongly to the fibers, the resulting composite is very brittle and loses a lot of potential strength. Also, to optimize the bond strength, carbon/kevlar/glass/etc fibers are typically treated with a 'sizing' that help the fibers bind optimally to a targeted plastic or set of plastics. Hopefully this new material can leapfrog off of the progress and work of the composites industry. Humidity will also be a concern that requires some testing and may cause some compromise on binder selection.
Also, 'typical' fiber properties really depend on the application. A typical aerospace carbon fiber is Hexcel IM7, which shows considerable improvement over the properties they reported in the article, and others can be a fair bit better or worse. The IM7 6k tow fiber is reported to have:
Ultimate Tensile Strength: 5.15 GPa
Elastic Modulus: 276 GPa
http://www.hexcel.com/resources/datasheets/carbon-fiber-data-sheets/im7.pdf
Sample properties of one finished product provide:
Ultimate Tensile Strength: 2.5 GPa
Elastic Modulus: 163 GPa
http://www.hexcel.com/Resources/DataSheets/Prepreg-Data-Sheets/8552_eu.pdf
A few years ago the least expensive carbon fiber would sell for ~$15/lb raw material with the epoxy typically around $9/lb, and the IM7 fiber above is probably an order of magnitude more costly. I don't know what figures they used for their cost comparison, but they can't really have the whole cradle to grave process figured out at this stage anyway, so we'll see what happens when they get some material fabricated.
There's a lot of work ahead, but this seems promising!
Far from it. Many boats are made by "cold molding", in which you start with a mold and build up your own plywood layers on top using thin veneers and epoxy resin. The result is light, strong, and very water resistant indeed if done properly. Some woods such as mahogany and utile are already extremely strong and stiff (comparing equivalent mass/area) compared to e.g. aluminum and fiberglass, and this looks like it would be more of the same, only much easier to form.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
No, this is not an excuse to cut down trees. Its an excuse to grow more, and cut down on the amount of waste that is discarded from what wood products we use. TFS even stated that CNC is made from 'wood chips and sawdust' which was, until this product was discovered, a trash byproduct of the lumber industry.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Paper demand is very sluggish in the developed world. The slow death (or metamorphosis) of the newspaper industry that is directly related to the digital publishing revolution is clearly responsible. The less-paper world is coming. It's coming later than many thought it would, but the paper companies are really feeling it. A friend who follows the paper industry told me that projected paper demand is a full thirty percent lower now than expected in the developed world. Not that demand is actually shrinking, it is just growing slower -- a lot slower -- than earlier trends projected. The developing world is more robust. Corporate investments in forests are by nature long-term. And there is a glut due to demand not growing as projected. Hence intensive research -- as seen in this FA -- into other ways to use pulp in quantity.
I briefly looked for something comprehensive to make my point and found this article from Paper Age. It is pretty general, but the writing is on the wall-mounted tablet display.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy