
Wood vs Glass, the window clash
The Science of a healthy life
In wintry Sweden, a team of scientists managed to create something as perplexing and wonderful as transparent wood. Wonderful because it charges right out of the gate with the highly beneficial promise of wood-based floor to roof windows made out of proper wood instead of glass. Promising both lower cost as well as much better insulation. Greatly lowering the need for heating once it is commercially available. Two great things for both bank account and planet.
Transparency is right now at 85%
Not much more is really needed to say about this, the benefit in the long term for both planet, construction, and end consumer is so blatantly obvious. The breakthrough came to be at Swedens KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where a team led by professor Lars Berglund managed to strip solid wood of both color and opacity. Of note for the immediate curious that is right now wondering if this somehow ruins the durability or alters the structure of the cellulose fibers beyond it´s opacity, both the strength and structure of wood is more or less preserved.
The team is now aiming to improve upon the process, which I assume will involve lowering cost even further and improving upon it´s 85% transparency level as well as the quality of the wood itself.
Future products include both the already mentioned floor to roof transparent walls as well as more rigid and insulated solar cell windows.
Source:
Biomacromolecules
Abstract
[ transparent wood ]
Short abstract from the study itself.
Optically transparent wood (TW) with transmittance as high as 85% and haze of 71% was obtained using a delignified nanoporous wood template.
The template was prepared by removing the light-absorbing lignin component, creating nanoporosity in the wood cell wall. Transparent wood was prepared by successful impregnation of lumen and the nanoscale cellulose fiber network in the cell wall with refractive-index-matched pre polymerized methyl methacrylate (MMA). During the process, the hierarchical wood structure was preserved. Optical properties of TW are tunable by changing the cellulose volume fraction.
The synergy between wood and PMMA was observed for mechanical properties. Lightweight and strong transparent wood is a potential candidate for lightweight low-cost, light-transmitting buildings and transparent solar cell windows.

Photography by Nasa, The Blue Sky of Pluto - “Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It’s gorgeous,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado.
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