“Superwood” has just launched as a commercial product, manufactured by InventWood, a company co-founded by material scientist Liangbing Hu:
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.
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“It looks just like wood, and when you test it, it behaves like wood,” Lau added, “except it’s much stronger and better than wood in pretty much every aspect that we’ve tested.”
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“In theory, we can use any kind of wooden material,” Lau said. “In practice, we’ve tested with 19 different kinds of species of wood as well as bamboo, and it’s worked on all of them.”
InventWood says Superwood is up to 20 times stronger than regular wood and up to 10 times more resistant to dents, because the natural porous structure of the wood has been collapsed and toughened. That makes it impervious to fungi and insects. It also gets the highest rating in standard fire resistance tests.