Bengaluru, March 31: Wouldn’t it be great if wood — a common construction material — is made transparent? That would be attractive for designers and would allow sunlight to pass through and lead to a brighter future for homes and buildings. Money could also be saved by cutting down on artificial lighting. That feat has indeed been accomplished by Swedish scientists at Wallenberg Wood Science Center in Stockholm following up their earlier success in the development of transparent paper. They reported having developed “transparent wood that could be used in building materials and could help home and building owners (reduce) costs”. Their material, reported in a paper just published in the American Chemical Society’s jourl “Biomacromolecules” could also find application in solar cell windows. The researchers said the amount of light transmitted decreased with increase in wood thickness. Right now the transparent wood they have developed is only a few millimetres thick.
“This is only a prototype,” Lars Berglund, the main author of the report told IANS in an email. “We expect to make thicker structures very soon.” Wood contains a structural polymer called “lignin” that blocks 80 to 95 percent of light from passing through. In their experiment, the researchers removed the light-absorbing lignin component from samples of commercial balsa wood. That was not enough as the resulting material was still not transparent due to light scattering within the fibrous wood cells.
To allow light to pass through the wood more directly, the researchers stopped the interl scattering by incorporating refractive-index matched acrylic (Poly-methyl methacrylate), also known plexiglass. (IANS)