It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but it actually comes from a laboratory in Maryland.
In 2018, Liangbing HU, a material scientist at the University of Maryland, developed an opportunity to transform ordinary wood into a material that is stronger than steel. It seemed another discovery that was not serious with headlines that couldn't get out of the laboratory.
“All of these people came to him,” said Alex Lau, CEO of Inventwood, “he is like, ok, that's amazing, but I'm a university professor. I don't know exactly what to do about it.”
Instead of giving up, HU spent the next few years to refine the technology and reduce the time that produced the material from more than a week to a few hours. Soon it was ready to commercialize and he licensed the technology for Inventwood.
Now the first Superwood chargers of the startup will be produced from this summer.
“At the moment when we get out of this commercial advertising system-we are a smaller investment, we focus on skin applications,” said Lau. “After all, we want to get to the bones of the building. Ninety percent of the carbon effects from buildings are concrete and steel when building the building.”
In order to build the factory, Inventwood has collected 15 million US dollars in the first completion of a round of series A. The round was cited by the Grantham Foundation with the participation of Baruch Future Ventures, Builders VC and Muus Climate Partners, the company said exclusively to Techcrunch.
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The Inventwood Superwood product begins with normal wood, which mainly consists of two connections, cellulose and lignin. The aim is to strengthen the cellulose already available in wood. “Cellulose nanocrystal is actually stronger than a carbon fiber,” said Lau.
The company deals with chemicals in the “food industry” to change the lignin in the wood, and then compresses the result to increase the hydrogen bonds between cellulose molecules.
“We could compact the material by 4x and you may think:” Oh, it will be four times strong because it has four times as much fiber. “But it is actually more ten times more than all of these additional ties that are created,” said Lau.
The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a 10 times better ratio of strength, said the company. It is also evaluated with fire classes or resistant to flame and resistant to putrefaction and pests. With some impregnated polymers, it can be stabilized for external use such as siding, cocking or roof binding. The first products from Inventwood will be facade material for commercial and high -quality residential buildings, said Lau.
Compression of the material also concentrates the colors. “You have something that looks like these richer, tropical hardwoods,” he added.
Ultimately, Inventwood plans to use wood chips to create structural beams in every dimension that does not have to be ended. “Imagine your i-wearers look like this,” said Lau and held up a sample from Superwood. “They are beautiful, like Walnut, Ipe. These are the natural colors. We have none of it.”