An American company has designed a new type of wood that, he claims, has up to 10 times a greater proportion of steel resistance, and is up to six times lighter, CNN notes.

“Superwood” has just been released as a commercial product, made by Inventwood, a company co -founded by scientist Liangbing Hu.

More than a decade ago, HU began an attempt to re -discover one of the oldest building materials known to humanity. While working at the Maryland University Innovation Center, HU, who is now a professor in Yale, found innovative ways to redesign the wood. It even made it transparent, removing part of one of its essential ingredients, lignin, which gives wood its color and part of its strength.

Most durable

Its real purpose, however, was to make wood more durable, using cellulose, the main ingredient of fiber.

The significant discovery was made in 2017, when HU first reinforced regular chemical processing to improve its natural cellulose, making it a better structural material.

The wood was first boiled in water and selected chemicals, and then underwent warm pressure to collapse at the cellular level, making it significantly denser. At the end of the process it lasted for a week, the resulting wood had a ratio of resistance to the weight “higher than that of most structural metals and alloys”, according to a study published in Nature magazine.

Now, after years of refining the process by HU and the deposition of more than 140 patents, Superwood has been marketed.

“From a chemical and practical point of view, it is wood,” explained Alex Lau, CEO of Inventwood. In buildings, this would allow the construction of structures that would be up to four times lighter than today, Lau said, which means that they would be more resistant to earthquakes, as well as easier for the foundations, making construction faster and easier.

“It looks just like wood and when you try it, it behaves like wood,” Lau added, “in addition to being much more durable and better than wood in almost every aspect we have tried.”