At present, the general trend of green energy transformation in global industries has not changed, and in addition to the energy sector, some traditional industries with high energy consumption are also facing unprecedented challenges. The glass manufacturing industry is one of the high-energy consumption industries, because glass is used as a universal building material, and the mobile phone industry is also a large user of high-end glass.
Since the manufacturing process of glass makes it difficult to simply reduce energy consumption, the best thing to do is to find alternative materials. Of the many renewable materials, transparent wood is currently considered to be the closest to replacing glass.
The birth of transparent wood was an accident, and 30 years ago, a German botanist, Siegfried Fink, wanted to find a way to observe the internal structure of the period without cutting the wood, so he came up with the idea of bleach to bleach the pigments in plant cells to create transparent wood. In 1992 he published the results of his research in a journal on wood technology, but it remained unfollowed until more than a decade later, when a researcher named Lars Berglund discovered it.
Lars Beglund, a materials scientist at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, has been working on polymer composites to create a stronger alternative to clear plastics. Lars Bergelund collaborated with researchers at the University of Maryland in the United States, who also focused on transparent wood, and after years of experimentation, they found that transparent wood could be used in smartphone screens. Soft lights and discolored windows, at the same thickness, transparent wood is far stronger than fragile plastic and glass, making it the most ideal material to replace glass.
So how do scientists make transparent wood?
The structure of the wood is made up of countless small vertical channels, like a bundle of straws that are tightly packed together. These tubular cells carry water and nutrients throughout the tree, and when the tree is harvested and the water evaporates, these tubular channels are preserved.
When making transparent wood, scientists first need to modify or remove the gummy material called lignin that binds the bundles of cells together and gives the trunk and branches a mostly earthy brown color. After bleaching the color of lignin or otherwise removing it, a milky white hollow cytoskeleton is left behind.
But this skeleton is still opaque because the cell wall makes the refractive index of light different from the air in the cell capsule. By filling the air capsule with a substance (such as epoxy resin) that bends light with a refractive index similar to a cell wall, the wood becomes transparent.
In the case of the same thickness, the strength of transparent wood is about 3 times that of transparent plastic and 10 times that of glass, so there is no problem with the strength of transparent wood. What matters is light transmittance, and in this respect transparent wood still has imperfections. The researchers found that transparent wood can only reach 80 to 90% light transmittance when it is about 1 millimeter thick, but once it is close to one centimeter, its light transmittance will drop significantly to less than 40%.
Due to the problem of light transmittance, the thickness of transparent wood is limited, so there is no way to replace transparent wood like some high-strength glass, especially bulletproof glass and other special glass. However, transparent wood is still feasible to replace window glass, according to research shows that transparent wood shows better thermal insulation performance than glass, which can help buildings retain heat or block heat, which is the current difficulty of glass windows in construction engineering insulation, so the development prospects of transparent wood must be very broad. Three minutes to talk about popular science