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A Chemical Bath and a Hot-press Can Transform Wood Into a Material That is Stronger Than Steel, Researchers Find (nature.com)
The process, and others like it, could make the humble material an eco-friendly alternative to using plastics and metals in the manufacture of cars and buildings, Nature reported this week. From the report: "It's a new class of materials with great potential," says Li Teng, a mechanics specialist at the University of Maryland in College Park and a co-author of the study published on 7 February in Nature. Attempts to strengthen wood go back decades. Some efforts have focused on synthesizing new materials by extracting the nanofibres in cellulose -- the hard natural polymer in the tubular cells that funnel water through plant tissue. Li's team took a different approach: the researchers focused on modifying the porous structure of natural wood. First, they boiled different wood types, including oak, in a solution of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite for seven hours. That treatment left the starchy cellulose mostly intact, but created more hollow space in the wood structure by removing some of the surrounding compounds. These included lignin, a polymer that binds the cellulose. Then the team pressed the block -- like a panini sandwich -- at 100C (212F) for a day. The result: a wooden plank one-fifth the thickness, but three times the density of natural wood -- and 11.5 times stronger. Previous attempts to densify wood have improved the strength by a factor of about three to four.
You just invented plywood!
This oughta make something awesome possible. From enclosures to cones. I'm betting this stuff is hell on a skilsaw.....
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
There is also a summary here at Sciences News.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
From the summary:
The process, and others like it, could make the humble material an eco-friendly alternative to using plastics and metals in the manufacture of cars and buildings, Nature reported this week. From the report:
There's a reason that we don't build cars and buildings (and other things that need flex) from brittle substances.
One can only hope it doesn't become a delicacy for rodents....
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/honda-s-soy-based-wiring-covers-irresistible-rodents-lawsuit-n504746
The bodies were Duroplast - a composite plastic.
Generally solid wood is a good choice for many projects due to three key reasons:
1. Cost
2. Workability; can be worked with hand tools and power tools, glues easily and strong
3. Water safe for years with no significant prep work
Steel is a lot stronger per pound, but to join it you either need to use mechanical fasteners or weld it. This requires expensive ($300+) specialized equipment like a welder and/or drill press. Wooden boats are generally good from 15-20 years without major renovations, and are serviceable with major repairs every 10-15 years up to 60-75 years after initial construction. Steel needs to be galvanized, or painted, or sanded and resurfaced every 2-5 years, especially in a saltwater environment (most of the things in your house arrived from asia in a big steel boat).
Super dense wood that's lost most of it's lignin likely is hyper brittle and doesn't machine well. Also, I can only imagine what happens when it's immersed in water. There's a non-zero chance it swells up like a dry sponge when it comes in contact with water or even regular humidity.
moox. for a new generation.
TFS says:
> Attempts to strengthen wood go back decades.
Decades? Really? People have been firing wood and embedding carbon into its surfaces for at least 400,000 years. This author is off by at least four orders of magnitude.
Whats the energy cost vs other materials ?
Waste treatment ?, what are the by products, how do we dispose of them properly ?
Recycling of the finished product ?
Long term stability over time at different temperatures
How strong is it versus its weight? I skimmed TFA but didn't find a mention of that. This page suggests oak, at 3x normal density, would have comparable density to aluminum. If this material is as strong as steel but as light as aluminum, that could have actual applications. I'd wonder about flammability and rotting, though. Skyscrapers or spaceships made out of wood would be pretty funny, though.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
An interesting point is fire resistance, which can be better for wood than for steel. When heated by a fire, steel bends and structure collapse. That does not happen for wood.
just recycling an infinitely renewable inorganic compound or metal?
I never followed that "logic".
Trees grow ridiculously slowly. And no, you can't just plant a few fast-growers (in a mono-culture even) and call it the same as an ancient complex forest eco system that sustained tens of thousands of species in an elegant balance of cycles!
Meanwhile, metals and generally crystals and materials made from ore are easily recycled in a single day, with some smelting and forging, using only solar energy from places where nothing lives anyway.
"Stronger than steel" is silly anyway. Steel is not very strong. And what do you mean with that word anyway? There's half dozen things that that can mean, and in none is steel quite the best we have. Steel is only popular, because it is very abundant and very cheap, with acceptable properties.
Using trees for building things (apart from decorative furniture and the likes) is as stupid as using fields to grow crops to then turn them into gasoline instead of food.
lets make sure the QA teams test to see if rodents love the taste of it or not this time around please.
It was a minor oversight when they switched to Eco-Friendly wire insulation and became an expensive :|
problem once the rodents learned how amazing it tasted
Then the team pressed the block -- like a panini sandwich -- at 100C
People who read news for nerds might not be able understand what pressing a block means in this context. A highly accurate and technical description, make it so readily comprehensible. Like a panini sandwich! Good, someone might mistake pressed the block something like a burger or a calzone. One might even be thinking of pasta or pilaf or masala dosa. Now it is clear. Press the block like a panini sandwich. Good. Great job.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Because if your metal goes in the trash, it doesn't come back. The wood doesn't have to be transported or stored in any special way to be renewed.
Trabants were partially made of plywood, weren't they?
Yes. Also, many WW2-era German, Russian, and British aircraft of many types including fighters, especially early in the war for the Soviets and late in the war for the Germans, used various types of laminated and/or compressed wood, some as a major percentage of the vehicle. The British Mosquito was one of the fastest aircraft in the WW2 sky and made the first bombing runs on Berlin due to it's speed, payload capacity, long range, and was made largely from wood. It served many different roles from heavy fighter, to twin-engine fast bomber, to fast reconnaissance, and more. Pilots loved the "Mossy". It was such a great aircraft the Germans tried to copy it, but with only limited success.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Even more stupid, at least in the short term, but in the long term, this might actually make sense (whereas ethanol as a fuel will never make sense).
Imagine this world a few thousand years from now. We've run out of metals suitable for building things, because they're all in use for something. If you want to build a new building, you have to tear one down first, because there's no steel left to make the girders. Mining asteroids to get more iron is, of course, an option, albeit an expensive one. But for a cheaper alternative, we could plant fast-growing trees and make up for the lower density of the soft wood by using a process like this to turn it into something stronger.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
In WW2 the British built a multi-role military aircraft called the "Mosquito" out of plywood. Originally conceived as a very fast lightweight bomber, it was a brilliant success at a wide variety of tasks: night fighter, high altitude interceptor, ground attack craft, photo-reconnaissance craft, torpedo bomber.
Basically it was the anti-F35: designed to do one thing well, it ended up doing everything pretty well.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It sounds like a modified recipe for Masonite (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonite)
"Masonite swells and rots over time when exposed to the elements, and may prematurely deteriorate when it is used as exterior siding. In 1996, International Paper (IP) lost a class action suit brought by homeowners whose Masonite siding had deteriorated. The jury found that IP's Masonite siding was defective"
Let's hope its properties are somewhat different
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
The chassis of Morgan sports cars (just about all that remains of the UK owned car industry) are still made of ash.
Because if your metal goes in the trash, it doesn't come back.
Can you explain this? It's not like you click on "empty trashcan" and the metal is deleted. That trash is taken somewhere and emptied into something. It doesn't vanish. It can come back.
Note that "strength" in this context is per cross sectional area. So taking a block of wood, and compressing it down doesn't change its absolute strength (it can support the same weight as before), but increases its measured strength (load per square mm of cross sectional area before failure). One of the attractions of metals like steel is their isotropic properties - they have the same properties regardless of which direction you load them. Fibrous materials are anisotropic - stronger in certain directions than others.
Glass fibers are also stronger than steel in tension, but they're weaker in compression and absolutely suck in shear (loading perpendicular to the fibers). The fibers just bend sideways instead of offering any resistance. So we embed them in a matrix of plastic (polyester or epoxy) to create fiberglass. Tensile and compressive strength are reduced, but shear strength improves substantially - enough to where you can walk on a fiberglass board whereas raw glass fibers would simply flop over and let you fall through. Where a fiber used to bend, the plastic matrix absorbs and transmits those forces to other fibers, converting shear forces into tension and compression (the board bows downward in the middle, compressing in the top half, stretching in the bottom half).
It sounds like what this team has done is taken wood, and cooked it so the cellulose fibers remain but much of the matrix which holds them together has been removed. That has little consequence in tension, but could weaken shear strength to where the material is structurally useless except as rope/cable.
It'd be interesting to see what comes out of this process if they'd used a [real hardwood](http://www.wood-database.com/australian-buloke/)
In some places landfill mining is already being done, but with an eye to reducing the volume of existing waste so that new waste can be added. (Planners have a hell of time finding good sites for a landfill even before the NIMBY crowd get involved.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Imagine this world a few thousand years from now. We've run out of metals suitable for building things, because they're all in use for something.
The Earth's crust is 8% aluminum, 5% iron, 2% magnesium, 0.5% titanium by weight. If we need more of any of this stuff to build a building then we can just dig deeper. Dig deep enough and we'll hit an iron and nickel core.
We are not going to run out of iron, aluminum, and titanium to construct buildings. Not in a million years.
By the time we're building a Dyson sphere (or more likely, a Dyson swarm), we should be able to cannibalize the planet Mercury. It's basically just an iron-nickel core with most of the rock blasted away.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
How 'bout a baseball bat made with this process? Could you make a bat that is the same strength or stronger than a regular wooden bat but lighter? Would that be legal for the game?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Looks like the chassis is metal but the frame is ash:
https://www.classicdriver.com/...
Good luck digging that deeply, unless you remove the moon, move our entire planet away from the sun a few AUs, and wait billions of years for the radioactive material inside to fully decay so that the core won't be so hot. :-)
If you assume that materials are distributed evenly, then you're right that we won't every truly run out, but that isn't a realistic model. Ores come in veins, separated by miles and miles of crap. At some point, we will exhaust the veins near the surface, and then the cost of mining will go up considerably. For iron, that might never happen, because it is really, really common, but for other components of steel (e.g. chromium, which makes up 16% to 26% of stainless steel by volume), it seems a lot more plausible. Whether that will happen in a thousand years or ten thousand, I couldn't begin to guess; that was an entirely arbitrary number. The point is that eventually, some important raw materials used in making construction materials will be deep enough that other alternatives will start to make sense.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
By the time we're building a Dyson sphere
Out of what, wood? This material sounds like just the thing...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
They made those planes out of wood because they didn't have enough metal.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
In WWII there was a plan to make enormous aircraft carriers out of Pykrete, a mix of wood pulp and ice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I initially read that as detonate and wondered why anyone would use explosive siding.
Density or strength (to whatever type of stress) are very relevant features for certain kind of materials, but somehow secondary when thinking about replacing steels or plastics. If you want a strong material regardless of any other thing, you would use something like cement rather than steel. Steels and plastics are strong, but also easily deformable.
On the other hand, there are some scenarios where flexibility doesn't matter much and steel is used anyway; also "stronger than steel" seems a quite catchy headline to get some attention. In any case, using that material to build something like a car seems a quite unlikely scenario because wood is intrinsically brittle.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Indeed. Sorry I've not mod points today - the frame is indeed wood, and a common thing to rot on earlier models which were not treated.
Actually, it was Duroplast mixed with wood chavings to save on the expensive plastics and still being able to freely form it. The duroplast effectively worked as a malleable glue to keep the wood chavings together. (And yes, my father owned a Trabant.)
An indication of just how good the Mosquito performed is the grudging admiration of Hermann Göring:
In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that? There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops. After the war is over I'm going to buy a British radio set – then at least I'll own something that has always worked.
A writer of SF stories who does not know from what our planet is composed ...
Uh, oh!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That is incorrect.
Everyone used wood, as it is leighter, hence the planes climb faster and use less fuel.
Technology to make robust steel planes did not even exist at that time. Aluminium even less so.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
After the war is over I'm going to buy a British radio set â" then at least I'll own something that has always worked.
And speaking of British radio sets, Mullard, a now-defunct British maker of vacuum tubes, were and still are a world standard for vacuum tubes. Old-stock "new" original Mullards go for ridiculous prices these days among audiophiles and electric guitarists and are quickly scooped up, when they can be found at all.
There are current-production tubes labeled "Mullard" but the rights to the brand name were acquired by a Russian company called Sovtek who market tubes under several brand names, including other now-defunct makers like Tung Sol as well as the Mullard badge. None of them are equals to the originals, often markedly different in how they perform and sound from the originals.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
So in modern marketing terminology, it was an advanced biopolymer composite. ;)
Ezekiel 23:20
No, wood chips and glue are called waferboard or chipboard.
That is called Oriented Strand Board (or OSB for short) here in the US. I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone use the terms waferboard or chipboard on this side of the pond.
A Chemical Bath and a Hot-press Can Transform Wood Into a Material That is Stronger Than Steel, Researchers Find
Why pay $15 a pill when you can just immerse in a bath of our special salts?
Warning: If you experience "steel" for longer than a few hot presses, contact your chemist immediately.
Wood will be impregnated, but does not prevent pregnancy.
May cause blue vision.
Generally solid wood is a good choice for many projects due to three key reasons:
1. Cost
2. Workability; can be worked with hand tools and power tools, glues easily and strong
3. Water safe for years with no significant prep work
Whether solid wood is cost effective depends on the application. Sometimes it's a great choice, other times there are better choices. As for workability, again it depends on what you are trying to build. As for water safe, it depends HEAVILY on what you are doing with it. I'm not about to dunk a piece of raw pine in a lake if you get what I'm saying. Most wood of any type requires some sort of coating or treatment to withstand water and remain in good condition for many years.
Steel is a lot stronger per pound, but to join it you either need to use mechanical fasteners or weld it.
??? How many wooden structures have you seen that don't use mechanical fasteners? And wooden objects like furniture that don't use fasteners use glue instead which is comparable to welding in cost and labor for many applications.
This requires expensive ($300+) specialized equipment like a welder and/or drill press.
You have a weird definition of "specialized equipment". You think $300 for a tool is expensive? You can get a drill press for less than $100 from Harbor Freight and a drill press is definitely NOT "specialized equipment". Welding is cheap and it's not something super specialized. I own a stick welding box that costs less than the price any of my nail guns. You can spend a lot on welding gear but people who do that can easily justify the cost.
Wooden boats are generally good from 15-20 years without major renovations, and are serviceable with major repairs every 10-15 years up to 60-75 years after initial construction.
Have you ever actually maintained a wooden boat? I have and they are a HUGE pain in the ass requiring a lot of upkeep every year even if you aren't doing major repairs. My family has two wooden boats and some years we don't even put them in the water because they are such a hassle. We just use the aluminum and composite hulled boats instead. Not saying that they don't have their charms and they do work well when properly maintained but I get why very few people want to bother with wooden boats these days. Composite or aluminum is FAR less hassle under most circumstances.
Steel needs to be galvanized, or painted, or sanded and resurfaced every 2-5 years, especially in a saltwater environment (most of the things in your house arrived from asia in a big steel boat).
Wooden boats need annual work and lots of it if you want them to last. Most boats do not use much steel outside of commercial and military applications.
Basically it was the anti-F35
Especially regarding the pricetag
There's a "Brexit leads to Palaeolithic" joke here somewhere, but I prefer to point out that despite the absence of 100% British mainstream, high-volume auto makers, the auto industry in the country is quite significant and that Morgan is NOT just about what's left of the car industry.
There are plants for mainstream cars from Nissan and Honda, there are R&D intensive companies making parts for all sorts of vehicles, there are companies that make composites for varied uses in motorsport and only then, veeeery far away in the rankings for 'total sales' and for 'complete units sold' there are small companies like Morgan, Noble, etc.
The metal Blenheim entered service in 1937.
The wooden Mosquito entered service in 1941.
Are you suggesting that at some point in between the RAF forget?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It must have been very impressive to outperform other aircraft before it even existed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not as fundamentally daft as it sounds. Icebergs are pretty bomb resistant - hard enough to hold together, soft enough to not shatter, and enough thermal mass & latent heat to resist incendiaries.
https://www.navcen.uscg.gov/?p...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Poplars grow straight and 50 feet tall in 3 years sometimes.
We really need to regulate tree farms. There's a lot of cutting of useless forests down in Florida and Virginia--the wood is bent and hollow, no good for anything--and they pretty much use a poorly-written law to get government subsidies for treating the entire natural wetland as "waste product", selling biomass pellets to Europe, and replanting with pine. We should have Federal laws and regulators to ensure logging restores the original habitat (by cutting in patterns to allow natural fill-in) and require permits for tree farming (to avoid converting biodiverse American jungle into giant one-species pine forests).
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At some point, we will exhaust the veins near the surface, and then the cost of mining will go up considerably. For iron, that might never happen, because it is really, really common,
Isn't this some kind of sci-fi trope? I'm struggling to come up with examples, though. Maybe the reason we don't see signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy trying to be heard isn't just that it's staggeringly difficult to pick up such a signal, but also that civilizations dig up their easily-acquired iron and coal, rise and fall, and make it too difficult for subsequent generations to achieve higher levels of technology as their civilizations collapse into detritus and rust away.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A sort of red-haired mirror-image of this process is used to make Rayon.
Odd nobody thought of this earlier.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Plywood is weaker than normal wood not stronger and definitely not stronger than steel.
Any statement about the strength of plywood with respect to ordinary wood is meaningless unless you also are specific about the grain direction and specific stresses it will be subjected to as well as which type of ordinary wood and plywood we are comparing. There are advantages to each and you can find specific situations where each has a performance advantage. While your statement is correct for a wide number of circumstances it is not universally correct.
just recycling an infinitely renewable inorganic compound or metal?
I never followed that "logic".
Trees grow ridiculously slowly. And no, you can't just plant a few fast-growers (in a mono-culture even) and call it the same as an ancient complex forest eco system that sustained tens of thousands of species in an elegant balance of cycles!
Carbon also gets locked up in trees... whilst trees grow, that's carbon out of the atmosphere. Where wood is used to build houses (that's carbon out of the atmosphere)... Yes, obviously it takes burning fuel to build those houses and prep that wood... but it takes even more with steel.
Trees may grow slowly, but that's all for the best- they provide a habitant for wildlife whilst they grow (regrettably mono-culture isn't the best for wildlife), This also means you need more hectares to get enough for building. Here in the US, we stupidly subsidize maize (but not other fruits and veg to the same extent)- even though maize is one of the least healthy foods you can get and adds to the obesity epidemic. (we're using tax money subsidies to make ourselves fat).... but that's a topic for another day.
Wouldn't it be better if instead of so many fields filled with maize we had trees growing on a lot of it instead? Prettier, more environmentally conscious (at least in areas that would naturally be woodlands)- the dry parts of the Midwest can still grow maize for all I care.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
And sawdust, of course, only magnifies that tendency. However, nobody was really concerned about how hard they would be to sink, because there was no way to keep the Germans from sinking them if they found them. The idea was simply to make more vessels for less money so that they could spam more supplies so that more of them would reach their destinations...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Mining asteroids to get more iron is, of course, an option, albeit an expensive one. But for a cheaper alternative, we could plant fast-growing trees and make up for the lower density of the soft wood by using a process like this to turn it into something stronger.
Give it 100 years we will have microbes creating wood planks for us that are stronger than any that trees produce now and maybe stronger than steel. Much cheaper than mining asteroids, and in reality we're probably closer to being able to do that than we are to be able to mine asteroids in any economically feasible fashion.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I've saw a single prop crash up close and was amazed to find that it was a metal frame with a cabin built from plywood and skinned with some kind of doped fabric. It had a basic frame made from what looked like rolled aluminum for the main supports and the rest of the body was metal rods. Overall it looked very flimsy but also very light.
Weren't most of the planes of WWI and WWI skinned with some kind of doped cotton fabric.
Good luck digging that deeply, unless you remove the moon, move our entire planet away from the sun a few AUs, and wait billions of years for the radioactive material inside to fully decay so that the core won't be so hot. :-)
Eh... you're over complicating it. Just drill a hole and stick in a straw. If it works for coconuts, it should work for this, right?
So that means they're witches?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Unless the mozzies lured them over the international date line. Or was that the F22?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
However, nobody was really concerned about how hard they would be to sink, because there was no way to keep the Germans from sinking them if they found them
Actually the 'unsinkable' nature of pykrete ships was a selling point
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
When I had read their report, I advised my superiors to scrap our experiments with pure ice and set up a laboratory for the manufacture and testing of reinforced ice. Combined Operations requisitioned a large meat store five floors underground beneath Smithfield Market, which lies within sight of St. Paul's Cathedral, and ordered some electrically heated suits, of the type issued to airmen, to keep us warm at less than 0 degree C (32 degree F) temperatures. They detailed some young commandos to work as my technicians, and I invited Kenneth Pascoe, who was then a physics student and later became a lecturer in engineering at Cambridge, to come and help me. We built a big wind tunnel to freeze the mush of wet wood pulp, and sawed the reinforced ice into blocks. Our tests soon confirmed Mark and Hohenstein's results. Blocks of ice containing as little as four percent wood pulp were weight for weight as strong as concrete; in honor of the originator of the project, we called this reinforced ice "pykrete". When we fired a rifle bullet into an upright block of pure ice two feet square and one foot thick, the block shattered; in pykrete the bullet made a little crater and was embedded without doing any damage. My stock rose, but no one would tell me what pykrete was needed for, except that it was for Project Habakkuk.
* I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier, Perutz, Max
A good deal of consideration, much of it highly technical, was also given to the feasibility of building floating platforms which could either be used by fighters to support opposed landings until such time as airfields ashore were available, or act as staging points for ferrying aircraft over long distances. The idea as originally conceived by a member of Combined Operations staff, and vehemently supported by Mountbatten, was that these floating platforms should be constructed out of icebergs. They would be provided with engines which would enable them to steam at slow speed, and with refrigeration plants to prevent them melting. They would be unsinkable. The whole thing seemed completely fantastic, but the idea was not abandoned without a great deal of investigation. Various alternative methods of construction were then considered by the United States naval authorities, but in the end there was general agreement that carriers and auxiliary carriers would serve the same purpose more effectively."
* The Memoirs of Lord Ismay, Ismay, General Lord
The other intriguing property was that they could be made so large that conventional bombers could land, refuel and take off from them. Even now aircraft carriers have very strict limits on what aircraft they can support - the planes need to be navalised so they can survive short takes offs and landings. The selling point of an Pykrete ship was that you could land a heavy bomber, refuel it and have it take off again. You could have a few in the Atlantic and have bombers take off from the US, refuel on a Pykrete base mid Atlantic and arrive in the Europe or vice versa. Anti submarine aircraft could refuel on them and protect convoys from U boats. Fighters could refuel on them and protect them from bombers.
They're not so much carriers as floating islands. If bombed they could be repaired with seawater. However the side that had them would end up having air superiority over the whole Atlantic, so in the long run the Germans wouldn't have been able to get close enough to bomb them.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I'm well aware of what our planet is composed of. I'm also aware that when you've exhausted the veins of metals that are near the surface, it becomes much, much more difficult to locate additional veins of metal, even though they are there.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Maybe, maybe not. It's an interesting idea, having a bacterium that multiplies, calcifies, and dies (or whatever), but I'm not sure it's really practical. You'd have to be able to provide nutrients to that bacteria, which means it would only be able to grow in a thin layer at a time, and you'd be limited to materials that can readily be transported through cell membranes in some interesting way without killing the bacteria immediately. I'd expect it to end up being orders of magnitude slower than growing trees. Maybe not, but....
You're more likely to be able to genetically engineer a multicellular plant to usefully create such a novel structure than a bacterium, IMO. And then, you're back to trees.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
In WWII there was a plan to make enormous aircraft carriers out of Pykrete, a mix of wood pulp and ice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There was also the better known Spruce Goose made using Duramold (a plywood like material)...
I did say "just about all that remains of the UK owned car industry". Noble counts, Nissan and Honda don't.
Geez, talk about just asking for a bunch of NSFW links...
Can you name a plane that was EVER made of steel, other than the tube and fabric?
The truth is that most of an airplane carries only very minor loads. Steel is overkill (and overweight) for the majority of the work.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Weren't most of the planes of WWI and WWI skinned with some kind of doped cotton fabric.
Many GA planes still are. Even after switching to aluminum, the planes would still use fabric for the control surfaces.
The difference is today the fabric is nylon that has not been shrunk. It is glued on to the still frame and then ironed to a temperature just over 300 degrees F. It is a beautiful process to watch, and was very rewarding to do myself.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
If you can figure out the attachments, bamboo is a wonderful material to build airplanes from. All of the grain is perfectly straight and runs in one direction, simplifying analysis and design.
The downside is its tendency to fray.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The largest land owner in North Carolina does nothing but grow pine trees. Come out of your Fern Gully fantasy land and realize that trees are grown and harvested like any other cash crop. For the most part, no one is out hunting for an old growth forest raze and build another housing development or make paper. The mills want 1,000 trees a day that are all nearly the same dimensions so that the can set up their machines and let them run. That old growth stuff is all different sizes, with knots all in the wrong places.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
They made those planes out of wood because they didn't have enough metal.
Lack of aluminum was an issue but the reason the all wood Mosquito was economical was that Britain had a lot of underutilized wood craftsmen during the war. Building the Mosquito would impact neither the existing workforce working with aluminum or require aluminum. Without all of the underemployed furniture makers and musical instrument makers, it would not have been economical.
WW1, most if not all.
WW2 not so much, though obviously some older designs stayed in service.
An interesting one was the Vickers Wellington which used doped canvas over an alloy geodetic frame (looks like a diagonal mesh). It was very resistant to damage because the structure could distort a little to redistribute the stress. Several returned safely home with huge shell holes in them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If you're going to use solar energy for heating, why bother with the electricity part?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
We were talking about recycling, not smelting. That means no bauxite, just pure metal.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Junkers did some experimentation with metal monoplanes in WWI, with the J-1 flying in 1915. The Junkers D.I was a fighter introduced in 1918, although it lacked the performance of a first rate aircraft. 12 were used by the German Navy.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
An exaggeration, although it was very fast. I don't know of a version that went faster than about 415mph, meaning that most late-war fighters could outrun it. However, an interceptor had to be significantly faster than its target to work well, and most fighters weren't enough faster than it to catch it reliably.
The US P-61 was something of a takeoff on it, but wasn't nearly as successful. The "Mossy" was truly one of the great aircraft of WWII.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Prettier, more environmentally conscious (at least in areas that would naturally be woodlands)- the dry parts of the Midwest can still grow maize for all I care.
A surprising amount of corn is grown entirely or primarily using rainfall as a water source. If the dry parts grow it, then they have to pump water...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And why/how would mankind exhaust such veins? There will most likely never be many 'full steel' buildings ... same for other metals.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Prettier, more environmentally conscious (at least in areas that would naturally be woodlands)- the dry parts of the Midwest can still grow maize for all I care.
A surprising amount of corn is grown entirely or primarily using rainfall as a water source. If the dry parts grow it, then they have to pump water...
Grass related plants tend to do better with low water than forested areas do. Dry areas tend to be natural grasslands and areas with more rainfall tend to be natural woodlands. Maize being a grass is more suited to low rainfall than woodlands would be. My point being, I don't think we should be foresting natural grasslands, but if an area can naturally sustain trees, that might be a better "crop". If you can't guess- I'm strongly against the subsidization of maize.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch