Successfully made durable glass material, but made from wood

Wood is a durable and flexible material, but it can rot, be eaten by insects and block light. Glass is not much better, they are easy to tank and cannot effectively block heat.

However, engineers have found a way to overcome the disadvantages of both types of materials by creating transparent wood.

The team is led by materials scientist Liangbing Hu at the University of Maryland, which has copyrighted a method developed to make wood transparent and make it more durable.

Sciencealert first wrote about this strange material in May 2016, but the scientists recently published a detailed study of the properties of this material in Advanced Energy Materials.

How durable is it? Engineers write in the study that it has "the ability to absorb large forces to overcome the limitations of safety of glass materials".

Using a hammer to beat like this new material is also unharmed.

Listen to your eyes and see if they try your best to smash this thing with a hammer. You can see a broken glass on the left doesn't seem to be able to stand this test very well:

The way they created this material is still a secret now, but Martha Heil, representing the University of Maryland Nanocentre center, responded to Business Insider in May that the process included the use of bleach. , epoxy and of course wood.

Scientists first soaked in wood , also known as sodium hydroxide . This chemical removes lignin, a compound in wood that makes them brown, hard, and resistant to insects.

Heil said it takes 10 minutes to bleach a small piece of wood and takes up to 24 hours to bleach a small log.

Then the wood is soaked in a "white solution" to make it transparent. At this step the piece of wood is "quite brittle and easy to crumble" , according to Heil.
The piece of wood will look like this if you don't bleach it long enough - notice the remaining dark black lignin rings:

After being fully treated, transparent wood is soaked in epoxy solution similar to paste to become hard and can see through.

This process transforms the structure of multi-hole cellulose tubes in wood - normally works to absorb water, bring water up to the leaves and bring sugar down to the roots - becoming extremely good diffuse light lenses .

"This helps the indoor light to be evenly dispersed, regardless of the light source - the sun is in any direction," said materialist Tian Li. Therefore, just the light shining on even a very narrow angle is enough to light through the window with this material.

This special "glass" is made of wood.

And because this "glass" is made of wood, it is also a good insulation.

"Our transparent wood has a low heat transfer properties compared to glass, making them good thermal insulation materials with low environmental impact , " the engineering team wrote in the paper.

Scientists hope that their invention will make wood a new breakthrough in the field of recyclable building materials, but they will have to upgrade their technology to an industrial scale - and complete it. Its awake, remove toxic chemicals from it.

"Creating transparent wood requires epoxy, so this method is not very friendly to the environment," Heil said. She added that the group is "experimenting with other substances including PVP (polyvinylphenol) , which is a recyclable substance."

It is hoped that environmentally friendly windows with anti-breakage will appear in our homes in the near future.