Make your own super strong, and super transparent wood! Easy and cheap at your house! Full details here: www.instructabl... and original idea from Zhu et al's paper: onlinelibrary.w...
Very interesting.!! I see that some of the authors of this work, also have collaborated in another work entitled: "Processing bulk natural wood into a high-performance structural material " whose mission is to densify wood. Basically what they do is : Step 1, chemical treatment to partially remove lignin/hemicellulose; (about 45%) Step 2, mechanical hot-pressing at 100 °C, (about 5 MPa for about 1 day) which leads to a reduction in thickness of about 80%. Most of the densified wood consists of well aligned cellulose nanofibres,which greatly enhance hydrogen bond formation among neighbouring nanofibres.
Thanks for uploading this under CC BY! Used it in my recent Summary and am uploading it to Wikimedia Commons and the Wikipedia article about transparent wood.
Good research there... there are still tannins or something in there. perhaps if you use distilled water as another step or something known to take away resins and tannins then it would be more transparent. distilled water can absorb a lot of a plants matter other than cellulose, i figure it wouldnt be agressive enough though.
