[HN Gopher] Transparent wood could soon find uses in smartphone ...
___________________________________________________________________
Transparent wood could soon find uses in smartphone screens,
insulated windows
Author : pseudolus
Score : 129 points
Date : 2023-12-11 12:31 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| neverrroot wrote:
| Wonderful example of going from needing something for research
| purposes to using in "in production" for so many other things.
| cssinate wrote:
| YouTuber NileRed tried this a couple of times, and had pretty
| decent success his second time around:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUU3jW7Y9Ak
| stevehawk wrote:
| Good video. It's a shame that his voice over is in that "TED
| talk" cadence where people pause as if everything they say is
| mind blowing.
| some_random wrote:
| Just put it at 2x speed, you don't even have to fiddle with
| the console anymore the controls are built into the player.
| unleaded wrote:
| when did you have to do that?
| ubercow13 wrote:
| Pretty sure his channel is successful due in no small part to
| his voice. It couldn't not be, considering the whole thing is
| just voiceovers. You also often see people commenting as such
| on his videos.
| eurekin wrote:
| He takes great care of that; I remember him mentioning some
| early video, where he laboriously edited out the plosives
| (hissing sounds) out of his recorded voiceover
| jtriangle wrote:
| He spoke about that in a recent podcast as well. He
| really hates mouth noises in general so he takes the time
| to fix all of that in post. Quite alot of work.
| gs17 wrote:
| I wonder how many people are doing that much extra work
| behind the scenes. Ross Scott was recently talking about
| manually editing out some very subtle sound that wasn't
| being filtered out from certain words.
| jtriangle wrote:
| You can remove alot of it with mic choice/technique, in
| the same ways that you can enhance it.
|
| There are also plugins that take care of at least most of
| it now, but it's not going to get rid of every instance
| of it. In current year, if you want 100% of it, it makes
| more sense to just train a model on your speech and fake
| all of the audio instead of recording it, then re-record
| only the parts you don't find acceptable.
| saghm wrote:
| I think I know what you mean, but the idea of "hating
| mouth noises" meant literally is funny to me because
| that's all that speech is
| uoaei wrote:
| The sound of voice is largely a result of things
| happening behind the mouth, in the throat. I think most
| of what people refer to when they say mouth noises is
| lips and cheeks.
| arein3 wrote:
| Funny way to put it
| jrockway wrote:
| I think the pauses are to sync up the narration with the
| video clips?
| nicetryguy wrote:
| The man has an entertaining channel with amazing chemistry
| experiments, millions of subscribers, hundreds of millions of
| views, and a career making videos on youtube. It's a shame
| you're such an overly judgmental dullard.
| PBnFlash wrote:
| I hesitate to wade into this but he does not do interesting
| chemistry. I am deep into chemistry YouTube and followed
| Nile red since literally his first year on the site. He has
| wonderful presentation, clean videography, and great
| presentation. But his chemistry is some of the most
| rudimentary in the scene.
|
| On the opposite side "chemical force" is amazing and
| borderline unwatchable.
| user_7832 wrote:
| > On the opposite side "chemical force" is amazing and
| borderline unwatchable.
|
| Thanks, subbed to him!
| user3939382 wrote:
| Immediately noticed the same thing and makes watching the
| videos painful. Just speak like a human being.
| delecti wrote:
| I think you're reading too much into the pauses, because his
| style is meant to be the equivalent of a lab writeup
| documenting his process.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| It was quite popular on YouTube at that time. With several
| YouTubers attempting to replicate the experiment, with various
| levels of success.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD4KfY4Nafgv6enUyv9Mw...
| geocrasher wrote:
| The applications for transparent wood are clear.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I think we can frame the success of transparent wood as
| dependent on the future of transparent aluminum remaining
| murky.
| skapadia wrote:
| I'm so happy it didn't take long for a "transparent aluminum"
| reference to be made. Now go save some whales!
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Hello, computer.
| antisthenes wrote:
| I'll believe in AGI when Chat-GPT begins to make jokes like
| these.
| nisegami wrote:
| I had a couple goes at it and if that's your bar for AGI,
| then we are a lot closer than you might think. Got a pretty
| decent one on the third try, but my prompt was a bit heavy
| handed.
| heyodai wrote:
| Can you post the prompt? I'm curious as to how much hand
| holding is needed.
| munk-a wrote:
| The true direction materials of the future will progress in
| remains cloudy.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| All of these uses like structural light diffusing beams and
| screens are all predicated on a production process and even
| prototypes that no one has seen.
|
| A little cart before horse.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Wouldn't it be more strange to pour time and money into
| developing a material where you don't have immediate use-cases?
| mattmaroon wrote:
| You realize people make this argument about every brand new
| technology. "You can't even make it at scale why are you
| dreaming up uses for it?"
|
| The use cases are the horse, they do the pulling. The cart is
| the technology.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I'm still excited about pycrete!
| jrockway wrote:
| Climate change was the nail in the coffin for that one.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| As a carpenter, the first thing I wonder about is dimensional
| stability. Wood expands and contracts with humidity and
| temperature, quite a lot more than people expect. How is that
| going to work on a precise object like a phone screen, or as a
| partially load bearing window? Not insurmountable, but very
| tricky stuff. In precise woodworking (fine furniture, marquetry,
| etc) dealing with wood movement is the main challenge and we have
| hundreds of years of work on the problem.
| valine wrote:
| Think of it more like wood fiber reenforced epoxy. It will
| behave more like epoxy for most applications.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Presumably it would behave like stabilized wood where it cant
| absorb much moisture since the epoxy has replaced internal
| voids?
| munk-a wrote:
| Yea - part of the process of epoxying the wood for
| translucence is fully drying it out so that those same pores
| and gaps can instead absorb the alternative compound.
| sheepshear wrote:
| It would be determined mostly by the dimensional stability of
| the polymer they're injecting.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| I suspect as with wood you'd see more expansion perpendicular
| to the grain compared to parallel to the grain because of the
| effect of the cellulose fibers all running in the same
| direction.
| sheepshear wrote:
| Yeah, that part wouldn't change.
| calamari4065 wrote:
| Those changes in wood are driven mostly by the fibers absorbing
| or desorbing water.
|
| Think of it as pressure treated lumber, except with epoxy. The
| structure of the wood becomes encased in epoxy and can't move
| at all. Then your dimensional tolerance is down to that of the
| epoxy, which is generally pretty good.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Transparent wood is cool, but imho it's a solution in search for
| a problem. As the article explains, you basically remove the
| lignin, bleach it, and fill in the spaces with epoxy. What you
| get is neither as clear as pure epoxy or glass, nor as
| environmentally friendly as wood since now it's more plastic than
| wood by weight.
|
| The material having more flex than glass or plexiglas gives it
| more impact resistance, so maybe there the phone screen use-case
| is plausible. But then you have to deal with the visible wood
| structure, and colors won't be as vibrant as they would be with a
| glass screen.
| bootsmann wrote:
| Wood is a carbon sink, if you look at the page of Woodoo, one
| of the startups mentioned in the article, sustainability seems
| to be a key pitch.
| leni536 wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if turning a piece of wood
| transparent would have orders of magnitude more carbon
| footprint than just burning it.
| shagie wrote:
| What is the carbon footprint of the glass that it replaces,
| and the lifetime lower costs of heating / cooling because
| of lower thermal conductivity?
|
| This isn't a simple "cost of process to make it vs amount
| of C related if burnt".
|
| And there are efforts to make glass lower carbon footprint
| too ( https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/new-glass-
| cuts-carbo... )
|
| https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2022-06/2019%20F
| l... is what its competing against.
|
| > Flat or float glass plants (NAICS 327211) operate high
| temperature furnaces that melt siliceous minerals and other
| materials to produce glass typically used in windows,
| glazing, and windshields. Glass manufacturing is energy
| intensive and a significant source of greenhouse gas (GHG)
| emissions from the industrial sector. Emissions from plants
| producing flat glass are the largest source of GHG
| emissions in the manufacturing lifecycle of products made
| with flat glass. In 2019, 22 flat glass plants reported
| direct emissions of 2.95 million metric tons of carbon
| dioxide equivalents (CO2e) to the U.S. Environmental
| Protection Agency (EPA). Emissions from these plants
| represent nearly 70% of total direct emissions from flat
| glass industry.
| robbiep wrote:
| What about the resin though? It's not recyclable (or
| decomposable) surely?
| teucris wrote:
| Yes, they call out that glass has a lower end-of-life
| impact, eg glass turns into sand.
| malfist wrote:
| > The material having more flex than glass or plexiglas gives
| it more impact resistance, so maybe there the phone screen use-
| case is plausible
|
| I'm not sure I buy that, there's lots of materials that are
| more transparent than this "transparent" wood that can flex.
| Polycarbonate is a great example of this. So transparent we
| make most of our eye glasses out of it, durable and impact
| resistant we call water bottles made out of it "unbreakable"
| but we don't use it in phones.
| teucris wrote:
| Polycarbonate scratches easily. Making a composite means the
| resin can be more brittle, eg scratch resistant, while having
| more flex.
| shagie wrote:
| A house I lived in for a while had one room where all the
| interior panes were plexiglass. It wasn't that clear (they'd
| been significantly scuffed up) and there were some cracks at
| the edges that had been half heartedly sealed.
|
| When asking a neighbor about it, that room was a child's room
| who in their younger years had tantrums and would throw things
| at the window. After the glass windows were replaced a couple
| times (once in the winter which was pricy for a "need to fix
| this today"), the parents replaced the windows with a rather
| durable plexiglass. They didn't break again, but they got
| scuffed up until the child outgrew the tantrums and the house
| was later sold.
|
| Having something that is potentially more energy efficient
| (lower thermal transmission) and more durable are existing
| problems that this could provide a solution or a direction for
| future solutions.
|
| (older articles)
| https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/10/01/transparent-wood-...
| and
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201006210438/https://www.fpl.f...
| encoderer wrote:
| Love stories like this that unintentionally show how hard
| parenting is. I guarantee a big share of non parents are
| thinking "I would simply stop the bad behavior or would have
| never let it start to begin with"
| jader201 wrote:
| I'm a parent of two mostly grown boys, one of which was
| diagnosed with ADHD at a young age, so he definitely had
| behaviors at a young age that were challenging.
|
| But even I'm having a hard time rationalizing that
| replacing windows with plexiglass was the first solution
| that worked. It seems like there are a number of other
| things that would've helped without having to go to that
| extreme.
|
| But I do get it -- every child is different, and every
| parent has different methods for approaching challenges.
|
| Just saying that this feels extreme, even from the
| perspective of another parent.
| bagful wrote:
| As a non-parent, I might replace the window with acrylic
| simply to deny the child the satisfaction of destroying
| plate glass
| joshspankit wrote:
| Most parents would tell you that having a child learn how
| to deny satisfaction is a huge detriment. If they learn
| it from a parent it's almost impossible to constructively
| address.
| verve_rat wrote:
| Put me in the "ever let it start to begin with" camp,
| because I'm never having kids. That shit looks hard as all
| hell.
|
| Having a kid that smashes windows when told to go to its
| room sounds like the kind of soul draining thing that
| causes relationships to end. Huge props to those parents
| for navigating through that.
| jdietrich wrote:
| Thermal conductivity isn't really relevant in window glazing
| materials, because nearly all of the insulation is provided
| by the argon in a double (or triple, or quadruple) glazing
| unit. Most of the recent advances in efficiency have come
| from improving the thermal conductivity of the frame and the
| use of low emissivity coatings to reduce infrared
| transmission.
|
| Regarding the embodied energy, I think that the reduced
| durability of _basically anything that isn 't glass_ will
| prove fatal in most applications. We abandoned plastic
| smartphone screens for a reason. A glass screen might crack
| if you're careless, but a plastic screen _will_ become
| severely scuffed in normal use.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| > A glass screen might crack if you're careless, but a
| plastic screen will become severely scuffed in normal use.
|
| Smartphone "glass" scratches pretty well too. Not that it's
| visible in daily use unless you look for it tho. Better
| have "scratched" screen than cracked screen IMO.
| swayvil wrote:
| Might be easier to colorize and machine too. Like for stained
| glass type construction.
|
| If we could show the grain of the wood a bit, that would be
| lovely.
| swayvil wrote:
| Is there a wood that's already almost transparent?
|
| Can we selectively breed it to be more transparent?
| pnutjam wrote:
| They developed one, but they kept crashing into the tree since
| it was invisible and they they forgot where it was...
| code_duck wrote:
| Neat trick they're using to fill it with epoxy with a specific
| refractive index to render it transparent. I'm familiar with that
| from working with glass... different glasses have varying indexes
| of refraction, and so do liquids. For artistic purposes, it
| affects how brilliant they look when cut and faceted - for
| instance lead glass sparkles a lot more than borosilicate, which
| is why one reason used for the well known traditional style of
| cut and polished decorative vases and cups. If you put a piece of
| clear glass into a beaker filled with water, you can typically
| see the outline of the glass underwater. However, if you tweak
| the refractive index of the water to match the glass, the glass
| is rendered invisible. This isn't super useful but can be
| employed to distinguish types of glass or create niche artistic
| effects.
| larschdk wrote:
| I wish it had a less click-baity name than "transparent wood".
| It's wood with the lignin replaced with resin through a chemical
| process. Of course things can be be transparent if you replace
| them with something else, but then they are no longer wood if you
| remove the wood! It's not the the wood that is transparent, it's
| the resin! Dammit.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Well, the names things have should at least give you a hint
| about what they are. "Transparent wood" doesn't tell you
| _everything_ about what the material is, but it does tell you
| part of where it comes from (trees) and it tells you that it 's
| transparent. That's enough for a person to have a vague notion
| of what it looks like without having ever seen it, even if they
| still don't know what it is. Conversely, if we were to refer to
| it by a more precise description such as "structure of
| cellulose tubules held together by a polymer and disposed in an
| axially optically transparent manner", that would tell you more
| about what the material is made of, but practically nothing
| about what it looks like and why it's interesting.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Me too. It's even worse when they talk about how the "wood" is
| 10 times tougher than glass.
|
| No, it's not the wood that's tougher -- it's the epoxy resin
| it's been filled with that's tougher, right?
|
| Edit: So basically it sounds like the wood matrix is a way to
| add tensile strength to epoxy to make it more shatter-resistant
| when it's in thin sheets. I guess it's tricky semantics whether
| the main material should be referred to as epoxy/resin or as
| wood, when it's their combination.
|
| And it seems like we have competing precedents: we refer to
| "carbon fiber" (the wood in this comparison) rather than the
| resin, but we talk about buildings made of "concrete" (the
| epoxy resin by analogy) rather than the rebar steel within.
|
| Thanks to the comments below for helping to explain.
| anamexis wrote:
| Well no, otherwise they would just use sheets of resin.
| KMag wrote:
| > it's the epoxy resin it's been filled with that's tougher,
| right?
|
| Your comment seems to suggest that the cellulose left after
| removing the lignin from the wood isn't playing any role. The
| wood really is playing an integral role.
|
| It's the epoxy reinforced with the cellulose remaining after
| lignin removal that's tougher. Just a block of cured epoxy
| resin isn't going to be tougher than glass.
|
| It's a similar case with "carbon fiber" items. If you just
| wrapped a pressure vessel with carbon fiber, it really
| wouldn't help much. It's the carbon fiber reinforced resin
| that's strong. That tennis racket wouldn't work very well
| with just carbon fiber or just epoxy resin.
| chongli wrote:
| Yeah, same goes for reinforced concrete. Just concrete or
| just rebar isn't going to work nearly as well. It's the two
| combined that provide the powerful combination of
| compressive strength and tensile strength. This is the
| whole rationale behind composite materials: combining
| different materials with different properties to obtain a
| gestalt material.
| tomn wrote:
| > Just a block of cured epoxy resin isn't going to be
| tougher than glass.
|
| I wouldn't be so sure -- toughness has a specific meaning
| (energy before fracturing), and polymers are generally
| going to be tougher than glass.
|
| http://www-
| materials.eng.cam.ac.uk/mpsite/interactive_charts...
|
| I haven't dug into it, but note how the article mixes up
| these terms to make it sound better:
|
| > transparent wood came out around three times stronger
| than transparent plastics like Plexiglass and about 10
| times tougher than glass.
|
| If you plot that on those graphs it doesn't put it anywhere
| remarkable.
|
| edit: This is like trying to sell an electric bike by
| saying that it's three times faster than walking and 1/10
| the price of a car -- ok, but how does it compare to a
| pedal bike? It's much more obvious when you do it with
| words that most people understand intuitively.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Even then, the wood is still stronger. If you research
| densified wood, it's a similar process that uses a heated
| chemical bath to remove the lignin but then instead of
| replacing it with resin, they compress the wood at
| temperature. It provides strengths comparable to steel by
| weight without adding new material to it.
| ortusdux wrote:
| Some quick numbers from a recent study:
|
| Transparent wood tensile strength - 171 MPa
|
| Basswood tensile strength - 2.4 MPa
|
| PMMA plastic - 75 MPa
|
| *Edit - Non-transparent densified wood - 398 MPa
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13598.
| .. https://designerdata.nl/materials/plastics/thermo-
| plastics/p... https://www.matweb.com/search/datasheet.aspx?ma
| tguid=1775e21... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35807412/
| TylerE wrote:
| Basswood is about the worst wood you could choose. You can
| damage it with your hands.
| ortusdux wrote:
| They needed something porous and compressible, so it
| sounds like a great choice.
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| I think the key word here, somewhat buried in the article, is
| "sustainability". If you can convince someone that what
| you're selling is really wood, then you get your brownie
| points for being green. Epoxy resin doesn't sound quite so
| sexy and sustainable in a planet-conscious marketplace.
| mmanfrin wrote:
| IIRC it's not replacing the lignin -- the lignin are the tubes
| that give wood rigidity. This process removes what is inside
| the lignin with resin.
| veddox wrote:
| The tubes are called xylem and phloem. Lignin is one
| biopolymer that is used in their construction, but it's not
| the only one (cellulose is even more important) - and you
| shouldn't confuse the building material with the structure.
|
| Also, the article specifically says that these processes will
| usually remove the lignin to make the result transparent.
| iefbr14 wrote:
| They'd better spend their time and effort on methods for
| recycling waste plastic instead of cutting down trees for
| products that will end up in a landfill within 5 years. What they
| are making this way is ultra fast tree fossilization.
| nine_k wrote:
| OTOH this is how they seal some carbon that will end up dumped
| in a landfill, and not return into the atmosphere for
| centuries, if not millennia.
| MoSattler wrote:
| Woods seems to have a few cool properties. Other people have even
| tried to make it bulletproof:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CglNRNrMFGM
| bitwize wrote:
| The _USS Constitution_ , the late 18th century U.S. warship
| that has now been converted into a museum, was nicknamed "Old
| Ironsides", but her sides are not actually iron. They are made
| of dense hardwood in multiple layers, with the grain at a
| different angle each layer like in the video (but not
| chemically or pressure treated). This was originally intended
| to prevent deformation of the wood under load, but the crew
| found it was strong enough to deflect cannon fire.
| legitster wrote:
| This seems more like a gimmick than a real breakthrough. It's
| just resin with organic fibers in it, right? Other than it being
| a curiosity, it doesn't seem particularly noteworthy above the
| thousands of other ways we make plastic glass replacements.
| from-nibly wrote:
| Agreed, especially if the solution is just to cram a resin into
| the wood. That kind of defeats the purpose of competing with
| other plastic alternatives.
|
| They point out in the article that they need to be better than
| petroleum alternatives, but they don't need to be a little
| better, they need to be much better.
|
| I guess we'll see though
| BirAdam wrote:
| Given that this is wood, I'd worry about movement, but wouldn't
| this be better used in windows than in screens, where it would
| have far better insulating properties than glass? If that's the
| case, the "sustainability" goal is far easier to reach. Or did I
| miss something?
| MetallicCloud wrote:
| It's addressed in the article. It could work as windows, but
| they'd be 'frosted'.
| atum47 wrote:
| Nile red made a great video about transparent wood a while back -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUU3jW7Y9Ak
| photochemsyn wrote:
| You don't need the resin to make transparent cellulose-based
| materials, this research group did it in 2009 with just
| compressed celluose nanofibers, although the resin likely
| strengthens it. Notably, pure cellose material has a low
| coefficient of thermal expansion: (available on sci-hub)
|
| Optically Transparent Nanofiber Paper (2009) By Masaya Nogi,
| Shinichiro Iwamoto, Antonio Norio Nakagaito, and Hiroyuki Yano
|
| > "The thin cellulose nanofibers tend to collapse by capillary
| action during the evaporation of water, and the deformed
| condition is fixed by hydrogen bonds that form between hydroxyl
| groups of the cellulose, thus producing a high-strength material
| without the use of binders."
|
| see also https://www.nature.com/articles/am2009122
| leotravis10 wrote:
| Here's the original source since the piece above is basically a
| repost: https://knowablemagazine.org/article/technology/2023/why-
| sci...
| andrewfromx wrote:
| if a transparent tree falls in the woods and lots of people are
| there does anyone see it?
| nirav72 wrote:
| Why call it transparent wood? It's filled with mostly epoxy.
| nine_k wrote:
| Why a certain material is called "carbon fiber" even though it
| uses a lot of plastic to bind the fibers?
|
| The fibers matter.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| "Cellulose-doped epoxy" is not very exciting as a name.
| eMPee584 wrote:
| well that sounds much more dope to my ears
| khazhoux wrote:
| I wonder about its strength. Like, how thick would a piece of
| this transparent wood have to be, at 60' by 10', to withstand the
| pressure of 18,000 cubic feet of water?
| erellsworth wrote:
| That's easy. 6 inches. We have stuff that thick in stock.
| araes wrote:
| For those interested, other papers in this theme [1][2][3][4][5].
| Number [2] is interesting, as it shows electronics biodegrading
| in relatively short time frames with experimental comparison.
|
| [1] "transparent paper electronics" (2014)
| https://www.nature.com/articles/am20149.pdf
|
| [2] "nanocellulose nonvolatile resistive memory" (2016)
| https://www.nature.com/articles/am2016144.pdf
|
| [3] "Hazy Transparent Cellulose Nanopaper" (2016)
| https://www.nature.com/articles/srep41590.pdf
|
| [4] "Silver Nanowire Transparent Paper Electronics" (2018)
| https://pubs.acs.org/doi/epdf/10.1021/acsami.8b15230
|
| [5] "High-Speed Fabrication of Clear Transparent Cellulose"
| (2020) https://www.mdpi.com/2079-4991/10/11/2194/pdf
| golergka wrote:
| There's such a goldmine of information in old forgotten research
| papers somewhere. I really hope somebody figures out a way to use
| LLMs and adjacent tech to extract these gems out of old journals.
| deadbabe wrote:
| As a daydreamer, I dream of transparent trees, but don't really
| see how they wouldn't just turn out cloudy and white instead of
| crystal clear.
| Animats wrote:
| Template:
|
| From Nature $JOURNAL: "$NEWMATERIAL to revolutionize $INDUSTRY
| and create trillion-dollar business." Professor $SOMEBODY of
| $SOMEUNIVERSITY announced that his team has created $NEWMATERIAL
| which will disrupt $INDUSTRY within five years. A laboratory
| sample / compute model of $NEWMATERIAL indicates that it can be
| far more effective at $PURPOSE than any existing material.
| $NEWMATERIAL will be extremely cheap once a production process
| for $NEWMATERIAL has been created and scaled up to a world-class
| product.
| threeseed wrote:
| Yes but many of those have been ground breaking e.g. WiFi,
| Solar Panel.
|
| Not sure why people expect everything to be a revolution rather
| than a series of incremental technological advancements that
| mostly come from research bodies.
| calamari4065 wrote:
| Because that's how the media portrays every trivial or
| incremental technology.
|
| The template above is applied to preliminary research, wild
| hypotheses, mundane incremental technology, and true
| breakthroughs and is all presented the same.
|
| Most things are not revolutionary, the problem is that
| _everything_ is presented as earth shattering technological
| revolution even when it clearly is not.
| beambot wrote:
| Now do this exercise for SaaS and AI!
| aurizon wrote:
| They can dissolve cellulose into carbon disulphide and this
| process allows complete removal of lignin and it is drawn into
| viscose strands. (rayon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayon
| there are several processes. There may be even better ones to
| discover. If these clear fibers are embedded in a clear curing
| resin under vacuum it may be possible to make a very clear pane
| by matching the refractive index of the viscose strands and the
| polymer. With a very close match in indices and zero scattering
| voids in the strands, it should be possible to make a very clear
| fiber reinforced panel.
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(page generated 2023-12-11 23:00 UTC)