See through wood is becoming a real thing. Imagine if your home’s windows had the durability of wood. Now think of it on your phone, because it might just become a reality.
This is wood.
This is glass.
They are clearly not the same.
Right now, they are totally different materials with totally different uses.
Wood is used when something needs to be made strong and built tough, but you don’t have to see through the panel, because what you’re after first and foremost is strength and durability.
Glass is something different entirely.
Made from sand and other raw materials melted at a very high temperature, glass very clearly isn’t wood and is transparent.
You can see through a glass window or a glass bottle, and its solid strength and transparent properties make it perfect for use in phone screens.
Except in one way.
It can smash.
It can break.
It can make a great device look awful in seconds with one simple fall, and threaten your fingers with the odd cut here and there.
Broken glass is bad.
But it doesn’t have to be the only option for smartphone screens.
A team in the US has been dabbling with the idea of transparent wood, posing the question:
What if wood could be harnessed to make screens?
The idea is sound: wood is strong, but you can’t see through it normally. But if it was made transparent, it would be a material able to maintain durability while also ensuring a degree of biodegradability.
At Kennesaw State University the state of Georgia in America, a professor and his team has been playing with wood and tweaking its structure to create an alternative to plastic and glass.
Professor Bharat Baruah was inspired by his hobby of woodworking and by buildings in India made with sand, sticky rice, and egg whites. The idea led him to try something similar with wood, making a sample of wood transparent by removing two of its components, and then mixing it with other chemicals.
According to the American Chemical Society:
Baruah transformed pieces of balsa wood into natural, semi-transparent woods by pulling out the lignin and hemicellulose using a vacuum chamber and chemicals, including sodium sulfite (a delignifying agent), sodium hydroxide (a version of lye) and diluted bleach. Then, the pores were refilled by soaking them in an egg white and rice extract mixture, along with a curing agent called diethylenetriamine to keep the material see-through.
The result is a semi-transparent piece of wood that is both durable and flexible, potentially being used as a replacement for glass windows, or even possibly for electronics.
In one approach, the team working on the transparent wood built silver nanowires into the wood to test whether the material could be used for wearable sensors.
As a replacement for glass windows, the wood could theoretically be used as a more energy efficient approach for glass windows in homes, but in technology, it’s possible that it could be used for other things, as well.
Replacing plastic and glass in phones with wood could end up making smartphone screens more durable, and could be something to help make phones at least partly biodegradable, too.
Don’t expect clear wood to be part of the next iPhone or Galaxy, though, as the idea doesn’t appear to be production ready at this tine.
At the time of publishing, there’s no word as to if or when the technology could make its way to your phone, tablet, or laptop, but that could change eventually. Armed with solar panels, such as Lenovo’s solar laptop test concept, a wood-glass screen could be a whole lot more eco friendly than most other laptops.
