At present, the screens of all the mobile phones that we have are made of glass or plastic. There is a huge market for smartphone screens which is expanding further due to increasing smartphone demand. New innovations are also taking place in this industry. In the coming times, you may see displays made of wood on mobile phones. Actually, researchers are working on transparent wood which can replace glass and plastic.
Let us tell you, researchers have been working on transparent wood for a long time. A report in Scientific American details the work done on transparent wood by Lars Berglund, a researcher at Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and researchers at the University of Maryland (UM). Researchers believe that years of hard work will be reflected in the future in the form of transparent wood instead of glass and plastic and it can be used to make screens.
How to make glass from wood?
If you are wondering how researchers made glass from wood, then for this we are adding a picture here. Actually, to make wood a transparent glass, researchers have modified and removed a substance called Lignin. Lignin is a glue-like substance that helps tube-like cells in the plant carry water and nutrients, which helps the plant grow and gives the tree its brown appearance. Researchers removed the brown color by removing this lignin and then made it transparent with epoxy resin.
80 to 90% light can pass through wood
Millimeter-thick sheets of transparent wood allow 80% to 90% of light to pass through, according to Berglund and Liangbing Hu, lead scientist at UM. However, as the sheet becomes one centimeter thick, the light transmission starts reducing. That means light transmission reduces according to thickness.
Wood will be stronger than glass
Apart from this, researchers also checked how easily the wood breaks under pressure or not. The test that was conducted for this revealed that transparent wood is 3 times stronger than plexiglass and 10 times stronger than glass.
Because this transparent wood is very thin, it is being seen as an option for mobile phone screens in the future. However, transparent wood is not as environmentally friendly as glass because epoxy resin is used in it, which is a plastic product made from petroleum.
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