We may soon be able to see the forest despite the trees after researchers at Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology announced the creation of a transparent wood that can be mass produced to replace glass in windows, façades and solar cells.
Their experiment involved removing lignin from a piece of balsa wood and infusing it with a transparent plastic polymer.
Lars Berglund, a professor at Wallenberg Wood Science Centre at KTH, said that although “optically transparent” wood had been produced in microscopic samples, the KTH project introduced a way to use the material on a greater scale, and for large structures.
For more international stories visit the CIOB’s global construction website GCR
“Transparent wood is a good material for solar cells, since it’s low-cost, readily available and renewable,” Berglund said. “This becomes particularly important in covering large surfaces with solar cells.”
“No one has previously considered the possibility of creating larger transparent structures for use as solar cells and in buildings,” he added.
Berglund said panels of transparent or translucent wood could also be used for windows and façades where some privacy was required.
The clear wood is formed by removing lignin, one of its basic chemical components. “When the lignin is removed, the wood becomes beautifully white,” Berglund said. “But because wood is not naturally transparent, we achieve that effect with some nanoscale tailoring.”
Comments are closed.