This semi-transparent wood is made with natural materials and could be used in applications including energy-efficient windows. Photo: Bharat Baruah.

Kennesaw State University researcher Bharat Baruah believes transparent wood could serve as a viable alternative to the plastics that are discarded. Plastics are among the leading contributors to pollution worldwide.

Who needs glass when you have wood with a touch of egg and a sprinkle of rice? According to Kennesaw State University researcher Bharat Baruah, wood with a few natural ingredients could be a more durable and sustainable alternative to glass.

Baruah and his colleagues have long studied biodegradable alternatives to glass, which can’t biodegrade naturally and is difficult to recycle. While it’s known that wood can be turned into a transparent material by removing the lignin and injecting synthetic epoxy, the process hinders the wood’s biodegradability.

To overcome that, Baruah and his fellow researchers developed a new process that removes the epoxy and replaces it with natural egg white and rice extract. The result is a durable, flexible and biodegradable material that could one day offer a sustainable replacement for glass in windows, smartphone screens and even solar panels.

The idea to develop transparent wood with eggs and rice originates from Baruah’s observations growing up in India, where he encountered centuries-old buildings that were built by masons who created cement by mixing sand with sticky rice and egg whites.

Baruah assumed that the same process could be applied to transparent wood. The team drenched sheets of balsa wood with sodium sulfite, sodium hydroxide and diluted bleach inside a vacuum chamber to remove the lignin and hemicellulose, leaving only a paper-like cellulose structure.

The voids in the material were then filled with a mixture of rice extract and egg white before being dried in an oven at 140 degrees Fahrenheit to create a semi-transparent plate with a slight brown tint.

Baruah says that while the wood isn’t yet 100% transparent, it’s biodegradable and could cool a building better than glass.

To prove his point, Baruah and his colleagues examined the wood’s insulating properties in a tiny one-windowed birdhouse. Baruah placed the birdhouse under a heat lamp and inserted a temperature gauge inside to test the structure’s energy efficiency. The temperature inside the house was between 9 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit cooler when transparent wood was used than when glass was, suggesting that this new material could serve as an energy-efficient alternative to glass in windows.

Of course, Baruah says much more work still needs to be done. He admits the transparency needs improvement before it can rival the clarity of glass, and applying the technique to transform large sheets of wood into transparent glass alternatives could be tricky, commercially and environmentally.

Source: usglassmag.com