Also, is it a feasible material? It would be so incredibly useful, so that you could put wood anywhere in any place since its liquid. It would be very flexible.
If liquid wood was invented, how would this disrupt the woodworking businesses? Let’s say it was a very general and relatively cheap process.
Depends how liquid you are talking. Wood filler/wood putty/plastic wood from the hardware store is made of wood dust with a binder. One fills small holes in wood and it hardens.
Enough small tubes and you could rival Geoffrey Pyke.
Pykrete
I don’t mean wood dust added to water to make wood paste, or normal wood ground up and added to water, I mean proper normal wood “melted” either by high temperature or something else.
If you discover a way of melting wood you will make your fortune !
You can buy fusible wooden filament for your 3D printer. It’s all been done.
My original hunch was that the answer is going to be something like “not really” - due to the microscopic structure of wood (and especially how the cellulose of the cell walls reacts to heat). And it seems I was mostly on track - I googled and found this Yale Scientific article which broadly explains the physical restrictions on ‘liquid’ wood.
Cheech voice…
Oh man yeah, you can smoke that shit, it’s really good.
The Monty Python references are just screaming to get out here, but it’s GQ…
Wood can become very pliable when heated and steamed under pressure - it’s how a lot of ‘bent wood’ products are made (some are just made from thin flexible veneers sandwiched without steam/heat though). Some timbers are better than others for this treatment - typically the harder ones with straight, long grain fibres. The best examples I’ve seen come out of the steamer looking and behaving like rubber, for a minute or two.
But I don’t think there is, or will be, any way to ‘melt’ wood to a liquid, at least not in such a way as to make it still look like wood after it has solidified.
Pure cellulose is little more than one part of wood that is liquid. So celluloid products would count as having been made from liquid wood in a sense. You could include Rayon in this. High quality paper (such as from the Kraft process) are pretty close to pure cellulose, but still in fibre form.
However some of the mechanical strength of woods structure comes from lignin, which is a very complex and many formed polymer. You can look at wood as a composite structure, made of tubes of cellulose that are made rigid by lignin support structures - a lot like a cored composite structure (say clad honeycomb). It is this structure, more than the actual chemical components, that makes wood strong and light.
So, if you could come up with a way to combine liquid cellulose, liquid lignin, and a mechanism that would cause them to expand into a structure where the cellulose formed walls and the lignin helped support those walls, you might get close to a liquid wood. An expanding foam might or might no be considered to count, but it has been done. Arboform - Wikipedia
Pure cellulose “was shown to melt at 467 °C in 2016” so not liquid normally, no.
Ugh, quite right. Liquifiable. I need to proof read more. :smack:
Perhaps a way to grow it into a form could work? We already do this to plants to some extent for special uses but it’s slow and needs constant attention. But perhaps some artificially produced living wood can do better.
ISTM the interesting properties of wood as a material are driven by the macroscopic fibrous nature. Which means that to create a viscous formable product you need some way to “comb” the congealing process to create the fibers in the correct alignment. That seems to me to be a very, very tall order.
Wood putty is vastly weaker than wood precisely because it consists of very short fibers randomly aligned.
The foamed materials mentioned above are the same sort of idea as the putty but with weaker binders.
For a comparison, modern carbon fiber composite materials are also a fiber embedded in a resin. Which gives them the same sort of anisotropic strength properties that are so useful. And also gives them excellent strength to weight.
A lot of effort goes into making this stuff in various types, but the major approach is long strands of solid fiber mechanically arranged to “comb” the strength in the needed direction then liquid resin applied & cured to solidify the fibers/fabrics into a coherent whole.
A similar tech could in principle be developed using cellulose & lignin as the materials. But you’d probably end up with the same “thread, fiber, tape, fabric, resin, cure” hierarchy. Not just “Pour goop in mold. Harden. Viola!”
Lignin can be dissolved in water if sulfonated, but if you remove the water and the sulfonate groups you won’t have the same polymer network you started with.
You could make an extruded substance with much the same properties as wood. I don’t really see the point, you could make a number of substances that property by property exceed those of wood and save wood for it’s aesthetic properties.
There are a wide variety of durable, high strength moldable plastics that can give you the approximate strength and hardness of wood and much better weather resistance. Why would “liquid wood” be better than these materials?
Huh.
Always wondered where liquid paper came from.
As a wood worker I have a hard time thinking of a practical use for such a thing.
Wood is unique like snowflakes, grain and colouring is complex and two pieces of wood from the same branch are not the same. If you could pour it out of a tub into a mold you would still need some randomization process to make look like actual wood and not like plastic. The best cosmetic patch material I occasionally use is hot melt shellac anything but a very small patch requires a huge amount of labour to incorporate grain and colour variations. Even small patches will require blending to get the colour right.
Even if there was such a product that would still look like wood after being poured into a mold you would still have to make a mold. Making a mold is many times more labour than making the thing you need a mold of, unless you need many of the same object there is no advantage.
I have little doubt that truly productively efficient 3d printing with useful materials is not far off. Even if you had a 3d printer type box that could quickly and reliably make stuff on site you would still have to tell it what to make. You would have a large digital library of useful objects and components to use I suppose, but likely you would often have to create a model of what you need first.
I’m surprised this thread has gone on so long without anyone mentioning nanocellulose. Lots of potential applications.