Cryogenic treatment [link] causes fluoromer films to be twice as resistant to something, perhaps scratching, and much less likely to peel off (similar to delaminate). At another kind of polymeric and composite material, grass, specifically bamboo-urea plywood, is published as becoming 9-34% stronger with cryogenic treatment. There is only one mention in google scholar of cryogenic treatment fo wood, and that is baseball bats. Maple (?) baseball bats beome 27% stronger.
Google scholar has no records on cryogenic treatment of other wood products such as lumbers and building materials, but based on cryogenic treatment benefitting three other organic polymers, it looks like it might cause greater strength (~27%) at western lumber immediately.
If it works as well as bamboo does now, then fir and pine could be 27-34% stronger just from immersion in liquid nitrogen 24 hours, or bred for a milder more value- effective treatment, -80c for 5 hours.
Using cryogenically strengthened wood to build new dwellings with 27-34% less building materials makes them more affordable, benefitting people across the prosperity spectrum. Using 27-34% less materials is also ecologically beneficial.
Doubled strength at lumber woods is better!
There are big ways to improve this. Breed construction and fine furniture woods to be particularly responsive to cryogenic treatment. Breed them so the -80c/5 hour "shallow cryogenics" treatment works on them.
Breeding is an effective way to increase a characteristic. I perceive chickens are now 4-5 times plumper from breeding, and agricultural crops have 10X (or greater) yields from breeding. So, doubling or tripling Bamboo's cryogenic treatment response seems possible at western woods like fir and pine with breeding. Genetically engineering lumber woods and construction materials is also beneficial.
Three times Bamboo's improvement is 27-102% stronger, or as much as double strength framing and construction woods. At fine furniture this double strength hardwood creates even greater durability. At veneer species the veneers are likely to last longer.
Breeding the new cryogenically treatable trees is easy. Using plant tissue culture, just grow the wood to the size of a 2 week-1 month sprout's twig size; dry, cryogenically treat, and measure the strength.
At say the first 900 genetically diverse wild samples the 9 best are found, then doing either genetic engineering, or simple breeding (er, protoplast fusion could work), you combine the genes of the 9 best performers.
The main thing about the plant tissue culture of trees is getting the cycle time down to 1 month or less, so even one person, doing 60 new tissue culture plate trees a day, can do 1800 bred and rebred (protoplast fusion) trees a year. The number of trees a year producible with genetic engineering seems a couple of orders of magnitude higher.
So, Real companies would do it differently, but one person could develop fir and pine trees with doubled strength for more affordable and ecological construction in perhaps less than a year.
Is there an idea here? Breeding any organism to particularly benefit from cryogenic treatment is new to me.
More new content is the possibility of cryogenically treating packaging paper and polymers. 9-50% stronger plastic means half as much (half as thick) plastic to package junk food and disposables, which is ecologically beneficial. Cryogenically treated paper packaging might also benefit from reduced mass as well.
"polymer" and "cryogenic treatment" return zero results at google scholar, so other than fluoromers and biopolymers the effect is unknown!
Making this paper could be cheaper than it sounds. Actually breeding wood to make ultrastrong cryogenically treated paper comes to the rescue. There is a type of cryogenic metallurgical hardening called "soft cryogenic treatment" 5 hours at -80c. -80c is available in an ebay freezer for $400-3000, or about 75 cents a liter. So you can treat a cubic meter of paper for $7500 of freezer, and run 4 batches/24 hours. If the freezer machine lasts 5 years then the amount of money to treat a gram of paper is less than 1/1000th of 1 cent. $5/four cubic meters of paper.-- beanangel, Jan 04 2021 cryogenically treated bamboo plywood http://en.cnki.com....l-ZZYJ201503008.htm [beanangel, Jan 04 2021] Patent: Cryogenic treatment of baseball bats https://patents.goo.../US20100307170A1/en [bs0u0155, Jan 04 2021] cryogenic treatment of fluoromer films https://www.science...i/S0169433213017443You have to look at the graph to notice one of the thingies is double the other. [beanangel, Jan 05 2021] microfluidics automate the genetic diversity process of protoplast fusion https://link.spring...2Fs10404-010-0720-2 [beanangel, Jan 05 2021] //Is there an idea here?// - I don't think so. There are a lot of words here but I think all you're saying is: Cryogenic treatment (whatever that is) of bamboo makes it stronger and better and this might work for wood too; selective breeding is known to work (e.g. chickens, farm crops); so selective breeding of wood might, or might not, make cryogenic treatment of wood work better.-- hippo, Jan 04 2021 Well, that's an idea ... kind-of.
Not a very well worked out idea, but still an idea.-- pertinax, Jan 04 2021 Sure, yes, although the mfd categories "study suggests..." and "we should research..." might apply-- hippo, Jan 04 2021 //Cryogenic treatment [link] causes fluoromer films//
Stop right there. The word "fluoromer" isn't in that article. Also the basic concept:
//Cryogenic treatment makes bamboo plywood 9-34% stronger//
Isn't true. We'd have noticed. Cryogenic treatment has a sort of halo of plausibility to the uninitiated, because there are situations where big temperature changes can be used to change mechanical properties.
Not here though. There's no plausible mechanism, there's no crystal structure to manipulate like with metals.
What's the situation with plastics? Well, freezing a plastic makes it dramatically stiffer, harder and more brittle, almost like glass. WHILE it is frozen, warm it up, it's exactly the same as before, I have plastics that have been chilled to -80C and -180C 100's of times. The plastic is the same. Because the amorphous web of polymeric chains is the same.
The most plausible situation that led to that junky article, is that some bored, poorly qualified people with a freezer did some messing about and convinced themselves of something that was within measurement error.
// There is only one mention in google scholar of cryogenic treatment fo wood//
So we dig a little, here's the patent <link>. Status "Abandoned". Why?
//, and that is baseball bats. Maple (?) baseball bats beome 27% stronger.//
Because that's not true. Even if it were, it's not that exciting. Wood is never used in situations where 30% extra strength would help much. Wood is full of flaws, tree-to-tree variability is large, it degrades/warps etc. So if you use it, you overbuild massively.
//Is there an idea here? Breeding any organism to particularly benefit from cryogenic treatment is new to me.//
So aside from the implausible nature of the cryogenic component (maybe you could check naturally treated trees from deep Canada/Siberia), can you do this?
Well, yes. Probably. But like with trying to make a longer lived mouse, you will stumble on existing strategies. Selecting for stronger woods will just yield woods denser in cellulose/lignin. You might start with pine, and after a few hundred thousand generations, end up with mahogany, keep going, something like ebony, then lignum vitae.
I can only think of one group of people who would have been interested in tiny improvements in wood strength: medieval archers. But if you need something stronger than the wood you have, just go the Mongol composite route.-- bs0u0155, Jan 04 2021 ...And that's why white pine sells for the same price as hickory...-- Voice, Jan 05 2021 DNA insertion of human designed cell structural and linking molecules? Lighter stronger wood. A lot of pathways and molecular interactions have to be mapped first.-- wjt, Jan 05 2021 Actually, since I think it would work, I'm thinking of ways to use high throughput plant tissue culture and flow cytometry to cheaply test billions of tree tissue variants rapidly.
Flow cytometers, $47,000 at alibaba, can process 10,000 or more yeast cells a second, or a million in less than 2 minutes; If the plant tissue culture allows the callous (callous is not quite cambium, particularly stochastic looking 1-4 mm tissue granule at agar culture) to differentiate to some length of fiber or differentiated structure of any kind, then automated dissolving or comminution of the liquid culture callus with (comminuting lasers? enzymes? Naoh?) frees up the differentiated fiber. This might not be wood fiber (although you can aim for that).
Then the fluidic system (similar to a microfluidic system, perhaps cheaper) transports the fiber goop to a cryogenic treatment compartment. The cryogenic treatment is anything from an hour at -80 to to 24 hours at -170. The fluidic pulp thaws, and then is transported to between a pair of transparent parallel plates with a laser interferometer aimed at them. The pulp is squeezed, and it's interferometry bendiness is put in the database. The pulp is then microfluidically moved to a space on a 100x100x100 cube array of samples for future reference. So that's a way to rapidly and automatically screen a million tree variants for superior cryogenic treatment response.
The timing is pretty novel; the 1-24 hours of cold treatment is orders of magnitude longer than it takes the flow cytometer to move it around and measure it's physical characteristics.
Also, I haven't mentioned the automatic generation of the 1 million separate, genetically distinct, plant callouses. One way to make them is protoplast fusion. At the link, microfluidic automated protolast fusion at plants is has a 28% yield[link], Another approach to producing genetic variation at the plants is just try mutation through radiation (UV) that leaves 10% of the starting material, which could be fir or pine pollen, alive.
Plant callus can be cultured in liquid culture[link], and callus can be differentiated into pollen. If it's possible to zap a callus with a laser, cutting it in two, fluidics (this is little larger than microfluidics) can transport one of the fragments to a holding array for reference, cloning and storage, and transport the other to a two plate interferometer (as described) for a before cryogenic treatment measure of strength, then to the cryotreatment area, then to the interferometer again.
Actually, my skills here are terrible. Basically I just wanted to note that you can process say, 300 3D printed fluidic channel arrays, each containing a million (that's just 100 array units on a side at a cube) genetically distinct plant cells in 600 minutes(10 hours); and then cryogenically treat your 300 fluid array cubes.
So it's a pretty elaborate machine and is very very similar to biomedical research tissue culture flow cytometry applications. I estimate the custom machine to do all this is $150,000 (A flow cytometer on alibaba is 47K). But for that you might get 300 million *250 days/year of output or 75 billion plants, likely of several species tested.
It may be that tree growing companies already have similar systems.-- beanangel, Jan 05 2021 // trying to make a longer lived mouse //
Other than researchers in biological and behavioural fields, who are such a tiny minority in the general population that their views can safelybe ignored *, most humans would probably prefer shorter-lived mice, or better mousetraps, or both.
*Nothing personal, you understand ; just looking at the issue from a statistical viewpoint.-- 8th of 7, Jan 05 2021 [beanangel] Sounds like a brute force method. I suggest finding the pathways and DNA/proteins that give the Bamboo the cold advantage. Once this information has be realised, hopefully there are species closest to take the phenotype. Also in vivo is different to in vitro, there might be whole organism reactions.-- wjt, Jan 08 2021 TL;DR: You can do both high throughput screening and more research and insight; There is something nice, gumption-wise, that you always have a working procut, and that is likely gets better and better throughout the first days of testing the new better cryogenic rood trees.
The really brute force version is using a new technology that makes new celluloses (just the cellulose without the tree) with combinatorial and microfluidics chemistry to make 75 billion varieties of cellulose polymer (branch combinatorics) and see if any of them has superior cryogeneic hardness. If they do, then work backwards from DNA and enzymes at the plant to make that best of a billion cellulose at lumber trees or also furniture (hardwood) plants.
Long version: I tried to figure out a math basis for the ethical thinking opportunity:
Is it more optimal to do firs things first, or advance an all fronts simultaneously
The technology development question: Is it better to screen 75 billion plant variants in a year, or find out what matters about them.
Hints from 1st things 1st/all at once suggest something like a two or more multipass compilation of all the 1st things on their ordered list, are then, depending on teh size of the compiler, connected and equated, and realigned with each other, then theoutput of the first pass of the compiler is a shorter list if first things first to do. I imagined that at some way of solving problems you would finde (lines-cross) solution where at some amount of compilation you could then see about doing everything at once;
Notably though, doing everything at once in an interconnected graph could be effected by the number of neighbor connections.
Anyway, so the anodyne version is: there is some economic benefit point (line crossover) If you screen 75 billion or more tree variants simultaneous with doing research on What the chemical mechanisms and DNA that matter is.
So: Both have simultaneous utility.
Just thinking though, noting fluoromers (organic polymers) get better with freezing, it might be the cellulose forms, molecule lengths and shapes that are causing the cryogenic hardness; You could again brute force it by using some kind of combinatorial cellulose polymer maker with microfluidics, where million channel devices.
Then with you one on a billion brute force cellulose you figure out how to make that cellulose at plants.-- beanangel, Jan 08 2021 All you’re saying is that you have no idea whether this will work and that a lot more research is needed. [marked-for-deletion]-- hippo, Jan 08 2021 // you have no idea whether this will work and that a lot more research is needed. //
[marked-for- grant-application]-- 8th of 7, Jan 08 2021 //[marked-for-deletion]// // [marked-for- grant- application]//
In 99% of cases these are synonymous.-- bs0u0155, Jan 08 2021 We have long known this to be the case, although your figure of 99% seems to err somewhat on the low side.-- 8th of 7, Jan 08 2021 More research is great but I think they could just do it now! [Hippo]'s rather dire MFD surprises me. Go to the lumberyard and freeze some lumber, it would, I think, like maple and bamboo get stronger. More product research is certainly obviously beneficial.
Based on the 27% increase in strength at maple bats, and the 9-34% increase in strength of bamboo I am sure it does something. I'm sure it does does different amounts at different plants. Breeding and engineering the wood to do better cryogenically just makes sense.-- beanangel, Jan 08 2021 All of the wood in our lumberyards is currently frozen.
Doesn't seem to add to overall hardness it just adds an extra step if you want to use any of it indoors because if you don't let it acclimate for long enough it will twist and shrink as it comes up to room temp and humidity.I know this for sure because that's why I can now stick a quarter between the lower and side casing of my window trims when they were flush when I installed them.<mutters curse words under breath>-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Jan 09 2021 ^Ultimately, blame rests with the endless jossily of the environment. From growth to end of use. Wanting perfectly static in the weather of dynamic.-- wjt, Jan 10 2021 ^ m'yes, quite.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Jan 10 2021 random, halfbakery