Is the Future of Composite Guitars... Wood?

[OnTheFidele]

Why scientists are making transparent wood

Stronger than plastic and tougher than glass, the resin-filled material is being exploited for smartphone screens, insulated windows, and more.

https://www.freethink.com/hard-tech/transparent-wood

An excerpt (bolds by me):

Wood is made up of countless little vertical channels, like a tight bundle of straws bound together with glue. These tube-shaped cells transport water and nutrients throughout a tree, and when the tree is harvested and the moisture evaporates, pockets of air are left behind. To create see-through wood, scientists first need to modify or get rid of the glue, called lignin, that holds the cell bundles together and provides trunks and branches with most of their earthy brown hues. After bleaching lignin’s color away or otherwise removing it, a milky-white skeleton of hollow cells remains.

This skeleton is still opaque, because the cell walls bend light to a different degree than the air in the cell pockets does — a value called a refractive index. Filling the air pockets with a substance like epoxy resin that bends light to a similar degree to the cell walls renders the wood transparent.

The material the scientists worked with is thin — typically less than a millimeter to around a centimeter thick. But the cells create a sturdy honeycomb structure, and the tiny wood fibers are stronger than the best carbon fibers, says materials scientist Liangbing Hu, who leads the research group working on transparent wood at the University of Maryland in College Park. And with the resin added, transparent wood outperforms plastic and glass: In tests measuring how easily materials fracture or break under pressure, transparent wood came out around three times stronger than transparent plastics like Plexiglass and about 10 times tougher than glass.

[brainfertilizer]

pretty cool, but only "10 times tougher than glass" doesn't seem like it is stronger than carbon fibers at all.

needing 100 pounds of pressure to shatter it instead of just 10 is an improvement, but I don't think it takes even as much as 10 pounds to break glass as thick as the average guitar top. So 100 pounds to break this NuGlass in a guitar body would still happen with distressing frequency...just banging the guitar on a doorframe would probably be enough to shatter it.

[OnTheFidele]

Originally Posted by brainfertilizer

pretty cool, but only "10 times tougher than glass" doesn't seem like it is stronger than carbon fibers at all.

needing 100 pounds of pressure to shatter it instead of just 10 is an improvement, but I don't think it takes even as much as 10 pounds to break glass as thick as the average guitar top. So 100 pounds to break this NuGlass in a guitar body would still happen with distressing frequency...just banging the guitar on a doorframe would probably be enough to shatter it.

I would think that the properties would differ depending on what substance is used to fill in the structure of the wood. The article describes multiple different variations of composite using the wood matrix. It's a new type of composite and there may be types that are very suitable for guitars, perhaps as good or more so than carbon fiber.

Imagine a wood guitar transformed into composite using this technique. Form the top and back, shape the sides, use the process and you're left with a composite body. Same with the neck and fretboard. Might be an alternative to vacuum-molded composites.

[Earl49]

Ummm…. wood IS nature’s composite. Cellulose fibers in a lignin (resin) matrix. Man made composite is carbon fiber — or other fibers — in an epoxy or polyester matrix. Sorry to be “that guy”. A variety of fibers and binders will work, depending on the desired properties. Example: linen / flax fabric in polyester as done by Blackbird and called ekoa.

[tbeltrans]

Well, we are all aware of the fact that if we don't get our carbon fiber guitars home by midnight, they turn into ... wood guitars!

Tony

[OnTheFidele]

Originally Posted by Earl49

Ummm…. wood IS nature’s composite. Cellulose fibers in a lignin (resin) matrix. Man made composite is carbon fiber — or other fibers — in an epoxy or polyester matrix. Sorry to be “that guy”. A variety of fibers and binders will work, depending on the desired properties. Example: linen / flax fabric in polyester as done by Blackbird and called ekoa.

The reason why people choose "non-nature's composite" guitars, like those made from carbon fiber, is not because they are "not wood" but because they are far more impervious to environmental factors than regular wood.

The thing is, these non-wood guitars use molds and vacuum forming, which we all here know can be time- and cost-prohibitive to experiment with. Not so with this technique, which might just involve bleaching and re-infusing the wood with an alternative resin.

This "transparent wood" looks to be a way in which the relatively well-understood principles of wood construction can be then "polymerized" (or whatever word you want to use) to create an instrument that is unaffected by environmental changes. And the R&D might be far cheaper than with, say, carbon fiber or eKoa.

[The Bard Rocks]

Originally Posted by brainfertilizer

pretty cool, but only "10 times tougher than glass" doesn't seem like it is stronger than carbon fibers at all.

needing 100 pounds of pressure to shatter it instead of just 10 is an improvement, but I don't think it takes even as much as 10 pounds to break glass as thick as the average guitar top. So 100 pounds to break this NuGlass in a guitar body would still happen with distressing frequency...just banging the guitar on a doorframe would probably be enough to shatter it.

There is more than one way to measure strength. I'd imagine that glass has extremely high compressional strength. It is unclear what kind of strength they are discussing. I'd also imagine that it would be very hard to stretch it apart or push it together. But hit it with a hammer...