We may soon be able to see the forest despite the trees after researchers at Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology announced the creation of a transparent wood that can be mass produced to replace glass in windows, façades and solar cells.
Their experiment involved removing lignin from a piece of balsa wood and infusing it with a transparent plastic polymer.
Lars Berglund, a professor at Wallenberg Wood Science Centre at KTH, said that although “optically transparent” wood had been produced in microscopic samples, the KTH project introduced a way to use the material on a greater scale, and for large structures.
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