A US company has engineered a new type of wood that it says has up to 10 times the strength-to-weight ratio of steel, while also being up to six times lighter.
“Superwood” has just launched as a commercial product, manufactured by InventWood, a company co-founded by material scientist Liangbing Hu.
Over a decade ago, Hu set out on a quest to reinvent one of the oldest building materials known to humankind. While working at the University of Maryland’s Center for Materials Innovation, Hu, who’s now a professor at Yale, found innovative ways to re-engineer wood. He even made it transparent by removing part of one of its key components, lignin, which gives wood its color and some of its strength.
His real goal, however, was to make wood stronger, using cellulose, the main component of plant fiber and “the most abundant biopolymer on the planet,” according to Hu.
The breakthrough came in 2017, when Hu first strengthened regular wood by chemically treating it to enhance its natural cellulose, making it a better construction material.
The wood was first boiled in a bath of water and selected chemicals, then hot-pressed to collapse it at the cellular level, making it significantly denser. At the end of the weeklong process, the resulting wood had a strength-to-weight ratio “higher than that of most structural metals and alloys,” according to the study published in the journal Nature.
Now, after years of Hu perfecting the process and filing over 140 patents, Superwood has launched commercially.
