Smart wood – innovative approaches – crazy ideas: Schweighofer Student Prize 2017

And the winners are: Felipe Icimoto Hideyoshi and Achmad Solikhin!!
Congratulations!

The Schweighofer Prize is getting younger. This year for the very first time, students have the chance to win the Schweighofer Prize Student Award for their innovative, wood-related projects!
The winner will be determined via public online voting. Take a look at our six finalists and vote now for your favourite! You can read more about the projects by clicking on the candidates’ photos.
The best idea will be rewarded with 5,000 EUR and will be presented at the grand Schweighofer Prize Gala held at the Viennese city hall on the evening of 20 June 2017!

Online voting mode:
The six finalists presented on this website were shortlisted by an expert jury. The final winner of the Schweighofer Prize Student Award will be determined to equal parts by the number of online votes and the points awarded by the expert jury. The winner will be announced at the Schweighofer Prize Gala in Vienna on 20 June 2017. The detailed voting results will be made public afterwards.
You can vote for your favourite candidate once per day. In order to participate in the online voting you must provide your name and email address. Participation is subject to accepting the Terms and Conditions.

Smartphones have become a part of our life in the 21st century, in younger and also in older generations. The aim of this project is to implement this technology in the wood education and industry by establishing a brand that includes forest and wood-themed mobile applications and even websites for every generation. The goal is to educate people about nature, recycling and sustainable development, use natural products like wood, encourage the youth to apply for wood or forest-related studies, share knowledge, help professionals in this field and to promote learning in a fun way. The applications can be divided to different categories targeting users of different age and interest: games (from simple memory games to hard puzzle, time-management and simulator games), educational applications (wood species database and technical dictionary with pictures), social media (community of wood identification, selling and buying, live videos of lectures, workshop event searcher, design project finder), books (downloadable or searchable, readable or audiobook), carrier finder (education, training, job, research), tools (for calculating wood parameters, price, drying time, etc. according to database or choosing optimal wood species, glue, coating, etc. for specific usage and environment) and many more! The applications can be downloaded free-of-charge or for a fair amount of money – depending on quality, provided information, target audience, etc. – in case of Android and iOS operating systems too.

The applications can help support environmental protection foundations as well. While using an application, the user can find related suggestions based on the user’s interest. For example, when searching for the optimal glue for structural purposes, the application can suggest products for the user; when reading about a wood species and its properties, the application can show examples from companies which make high value-added products from that species or suggest an alternative native species instead of an exotic one. Social media can be part of the user experience, e.g. trip/hiking route can be posted showing the tree species identified. The establishment of this multidisciplinary project requires the cooperation of several fields, from wood engineering through mobile application development and graphic design to psychology and ergonomics as well.

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Engineers are always searching for new ways to recompose, reinforce, and reconnect timber structural elements that have been damaged by weather, termites, fire and physical or mechanical wear. Until now synthetic adhesives, fibers and steel elements have been the most common solutions. However, the use of materials with the same anatomical, physical, and mechanical characteristics of the damaged structure would provide better results in terms of material compatibility and stability, besides addressing architectural and environmental concerns.

Here we suggest developing plant living tissues that could be used to recover wood damaged structures. In vitro cultivated plant cells would be grown to produce fiber rich tissues that could be drafted in the damaged spots.
The aim is to establish a natural connection between the damaged wood and the drafted fiber of the new tissue, regenerating pieces and adding further strength, e.g. tensile strength, making it more efficient than conventional rehabilitation methods. Figure 1 shows an example of wood failure and Figure 2 shows examples of the living tissue rehabilitation process.

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Service life of wood is more and more frequently affected by aesthetic requirements than functional ones. Accurate service life predictions, service life cost analyses, and the aesthetic performance of newly available bio-based building materials are essential for their promotion in the construction sector. The appearance of bio-based building materials often changes during their service life. Therefore, the aesthetic service life is often the decisive criterion for these applications.

During their functional life, building and building components are exposed to several environment conditions in numerous ways. For wood material, moisture stress and biological factors like mould and decay fungi are often critical, especially in cladding and decking structures – two commodities where wood is abundantly used – in exterior use conditions.

One of possible inputs for Building Information Model (BIM) could be aesthetical performance of wood-based materials used as cladding and decking structures. Numerical models for computation of the weather dose on the base of meteorological data could be considered as an approach for assessing incursion of the environment, including solar radiation, temperature and relative humidity of the air (possibly other parameters such as geographical position, rain periods, wind speed and direction). The model could provide indicator precisely quantifying the weather dose to be used for modelling of the aesthetical changes of biomaterials exposed to natural weathering as well as for technical characteristics influencing service life performance.

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Phase change materials (PCMs) is a topic with rising interest. These kind of components permit to store a large amount of heat within a small volume. They store energy while changing phase. Usually, the solid – liquid transition is used : during the day, the PCM melts, stocking up energy. During the night, the PCM solidifies, releasing the daylight energy to the building.

Such materials are often used in building applications over their solid-liquid transition. However, recent discovers are promising : PCMs with a solid/solid transition are now able to store large amount of heat. This could permit to build wood flooring with PCMs without leakage problematics !

My proposal is to add solid-solid PCM within the intermediate layer of some Engineered wood flooring (EWF). Two external layers (upper and lower) would close an intermediate layer containing PCMs within compartments. Two geometries of intermediate layers are proposed in the sketch on the left. Compartments could permit EWF to be cut, indeed EWF need to be cut when laid in order to fit the room size. The result would be very high thermal mass wood flooring.

Obviously, further researches are needed. It is necessary to evaluate mechanical and hygro-mechanical properties of such an assembly. Several materials such as plywood, hardwood or MDF/HDF/OSB could be used for different layers to achieve a sufficient mechanical resistance.

The sun brings us every year between 5000 and 10 000 times the energy we actually consume. This constitute a huge potential. Solar energy is our future, let’s gather it as much as we can !

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Due to the advancements in digital fabrication, design now has the power of being systematically shared, improved, digitally distributed and locally produced. Craftsmanship has evolved to crafts-machine-ship, rising design to a level of precision and efficiency no man could accomplish. These technological advancements provide the opportunity for a long term sustainable solution to the built environment, eliminating emissions associated with transport, moving towards locally fabricated products and importantly reducing waste, thanks to new found efficiencies.

OSW is envisioned as a community of makers and creators, with all the potential of a world-wide, collaborative, social network; democratizing design through a platform that lets creators connect directly with their costumers, increasing access, choices and options as it provides solutions that can be adapted to serve different needs, that can be updated to be more efficient, where each individual instance of production has the possibility to be unique and improve upon its predecessor.
Open Source Wood builds on the conviction that multidisciplinary approaches ignite innovation and that sharing knowledge openly and freely, encourages progress.

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In this study, we provide a novel study on improving wood stability, mechanical, and bio-preservative properties of nanohybrid biopolymers - impregnated tropical fast-growing tree woods. The woods are mostly composed by juvenile wood with inferior properties for both structural and non-structural objectives. Prior the impregnation, chitosan nanoparticles are isolated from speckled swimming crab shells by means of deacetylation of chitin nanofibers and mechanical disintegration with 10-80 nm in width1 whereas crystalline nanocellulose is isolated from wood flour wastes by means of acid hydrolysis and ultrasonication with the average thickness of 1–3.5 nm2.

To attain superior properties, nanohybrid biopolymers for chitosan nanoparticles and crystalline nanocellulose with a ratio of 10:1 are mixed, and impregnated in six-year-old fast growing tree woods using a vacuum at 20 atm for 60 min, and followed with 2 h at 2.5 bar pressure. Functional nanohybrid polymer solution derived from chitosan nanoparticles, cationic chitosan, cellulose nanocrystal, and glycidoxypropyltrimethoxysilane were prepared and subsequently modified with PFSOF3. The impregnated woods are then coated with the functional perfluorinated solution. Resultant impregnated woods are investigated their wood stability, self-cleaning, mechanical, and bio-preservative properties. Impregnated woods, which are functionally perfluorinated had lotus effect3,4 with a water contact angle (CA) above 150° and CA hysterisis of less than 10°. Due to the nature, the woods have good self-cleaning properties, stability, and durability against high humidity and water leaching5. Wood stability and bio-preservative nature against bacteria, fungi, moulds, and termites can be enhanced with the inclusion of nanohybrid biopolymers of chitosan nanoparticles and cellulose nanocrystal3,6,7. These enhanced properties of the woods will be applicable for both luxurious structural and non-structural building application.

References:
1. Lin, M.-C., Wu, Q. Song, K., Cheng, H.N., Suzuki, S., Lei, T. ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 4, 4385-4395 (2016).
2. Fahma, F., Iwamoto, S., Hori, N., Iwata, T., Takemura, A. Cellulose 17, 977–985 (2010).
3. Song, K., Gao, A., Cheng, X., Xie, K. Carbohydr. Polym. 130, 381-387 (2015).
4. de Francisco, R., Tiemblo, P., Hoyos, M., Arellano, C.G., Garcia, N., Berglund, L., Synytska, A. ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 6, 18998-19010 (2014).
5. Verho, T., Bower, C., Andrew, P., Franssila, S., Ikkala, O., Ras, R.H.A. Adv. Mater. 23, 673-678 (2010).
6. Panek, M., Reinprecht, L., Hulla, M. BioResources, 9, 5588-5603 (2014).
7. Raji, O., Telmadarrehei, T., Tang, J.D., Jeremic, D. Proceedings of the Canadian Wood Preservation, 128-136 (2015)

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Voting is closed now.

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Smart wood – innovative approaches – crazy ideas: Schweighofer Student Prize 2017

And the winners are: Felipe Icimoto Hideyoshi and Achmad Solikhin!! Congratulations!

Voting is closed now.

And the winners are: Felipe Icimoto Hideyoshi and Achmad Solikhin!!
Congratulations!