A few days ago, during the annual conference of the American Chemical Society held in Florida, a group of researchers at the Kth Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm announced the creation of a new type of wood with astonishing properties.
It’s called PEG and stands for phase change material is consists of a solid material that melts at a temperature of about 26 degrees Celsius, storing energy in the process. “The melting temperature can be adjusted using different types OF PEG- Explained Céline Montanari, the head of speech during the conference -During a sunny day, the material will absorb the heat before it reaches the interior space, and the interior is cooler than the outside. And at night the opposite happens: the PEG becomes solid and releases heat inside, so you can maintain a constant temperature at home. It is an excellent thermal insulator, when compared with glass and plastic, and could find a wide use in green building “.
Not only that, since this material is also able to pass the light, albeit in a filtered way, and to resist large loads, which makes it highly useful in the building field not only for the properties of heat management.
The reason for these properties, uncommon in wood, is in the chemical treatment invented by the Swedish research group, led by Lars Berglund, Ph.D., together with colleagues AT THE kth Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The study of this optically transparent wood was also published in the journal ACS Biomacromolecules sees the creation of a compound able to join perfectly with the plant cells of the wood.
“PEG and wood are both biobased and biodegradable- concludes Berglund -the only part that is not biodegradable is acrylic, but it could be replaced by another biological-based polymer.”