[HN Gopher] Transistor Made of Wood
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Transistor Made of Wood
 
Author : tlubinski
Score  : 68 points
Date   : 2023-04-24 20:35 UTC (1 days ago)
 
web link (www.pnas.org)
w3m dump (www.pnas.org)
 
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| Transistor made of *electron-ion conducting polymer* mixed with
| wood:
| 
| "The CW is prepared using a two-step strategy of wood
| delignification followed by wood amalgamation with a mixed
| electron-ion conducting polymer,
| poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)-polystyrene sulfonate
| (PEDOT:PSS)."
 
  | hinkley wrote:
  | Supercapacitors are made of charcoal, and it looks like
  | charcoal is mainly lignin, so the exact opposite.
 
  | djha-skin wrote:
  | Yeah, anytime someone applies "delignification" to wood, you're
  | left with rayon (synthetic cotton). Then they added polymers
  | back. So it's like they mixed some plastic and some cotton
  | together and called it wood.
 
  | ChuckMcM wrote:
  | Would you read a paper on "wood coated transistors" ? :-)
  | 
  | I completely agree that the phrasing of the topic is misleading
  | at best. However, the paper does add to the growing body of
  | work on "organic" electronics. The journey of organic LEDs from
  | concept to product is, to me, an interesting corollary. How
  | much "metal" can you remove from electronics? How many of the
  | elements that make electronics "toxic"? How many of the
  | properties of the underlying organic base can you retain while
  | still having a signal carrying capacity?
  | 
  | As an example;
  | 
  | E-"paper", made from cellulose hosted transistors, that are
  | configured not to "switch" but to change the chemical
  | composition of a "pixel" that changes is light absorption
  | characteristics (and thus its "color" with respect to non-
  | activated pixels.
  | 
  | Clearly a sci-fi "dream" or construction at this point, but
  | understanding how to make cellulose a conductor while retaining
  | the ability to make it into paper is a step toward possible
  | realization of such an idea.
  | 
  | The bottom line for me is that "organic" electronics is one of
  | those black swan type ideas that _could_ really change a lot of
  | things. So I collect papers like this one to track what people
  | with time to research the questions find out. :-)
 
    | kevin_thibedeau wrote:
    | > wood coated transistors
    | 
    | Definitely a market for those with the audiophool crowd.
 
  | hypertele-Xii wrote:
  | Similar to the "transparent wood!" story that made rounds a
  | while back, where they took the wood out of the wood and
  | replaced it with transparent plastic. Incredibly dishonest.
 
    | its_ethan wrote:
    | Here's a YouTube link to anyone curious about transparent
    | wood: https://youtu.be/uUU3jW7Y9Ak
    | 
    | I don't know if I agree with it being "incredibly dishonest"
    | - I think it's a bit misleading (like most popular science),
    | but it comes from a place of wanting to get clicks/ be more
    | mass-appeal, rather than to actually deceive.
 
      | uoaei wrote:
      | Honesty is about honestly broadcasting the extent of your
      | beliefs as much as it is expressing your true beliefs. If
      | you fake a naivete and then lean into that to get clicks,
      | you're still being dishonest.
 
    | Animats wrote:
    | Right. Once you take the lignite out of wood, you have a
    | porous structure into which you can put other liquids. There
    | are other variations on this theme - super strong wood,
    | conductive wood, etc.[1] Some of those tricks work on
    | cellulose agricultural waste.
    | 
    | Probably the most useful idea in this direction is oriented-
    | strand board from bagasse, the long strands left after sugar
    | is remove from sugar cane. Layers oriented in different
    | directions are glued together, like plywood, to make
    | something like particleboard, but with better tensile
    | strength. It's a low-end composite material.
    | 
    | [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stronger-than-
    | ste...
 
      | sidewndr46 wrote:
      | Is that product commercially available at low prices?
      | Regular OSB took a while for me to understand but now that
      | I do it's used in all sorts of stuff I build. It's cheap
      | and much more dimensional than lumber, which often has a
      | slight warp to it.
 
    | lordnacho wrote:
    | So if the ship's planks were replaced by carbon fibre and the
    | ropes by composites, is it not the same ship?
 
      | mc32 wrote:
      | It's the same ship except it's not a wooden vessel anymore.
 
  | dmurray wrote:
  | > Wood delignification
  | 
  | For those of you who are not up to speed on your Latin, the
  | Saxon version of this word would be "unwooding".
 
    | Joker_vD wrote:
    | So is this like taking a chunk of wood out of the piece of
    | wood by cutting a hole in it so you get a window (which is
    | both wooden and, technically, transparent, well, mostly), or
    | like taking a piece of wood and then running it through a
    | chain of chemical reactions ending up with some transparent
    | substance which, in its chemical structure, may not even
    | resemble wood at all?
 
      | hinkley wrote:
      | There was an avenue of organ cloning being researched a few
      | years ago. The idea was to treat all available organs as
      | substandard (in that if it's not yours, you're buying time
      | while you fight organ rejection for the rest of your days).
      | 
      | I bring it up here because it was a lot like
      | delignification. Printing organs doesn't really work, but
      | what if we took a random liver, removed all of the organic
      | matter except the collagen, and then introduced a small
      | sample of your cells into that collagen. Can we get it to
      | grow into a functioning organ that is completely
      | genetically compatible with you? The answer was 'maybe'.
      | 
      | Or perhaps a little less fanciful, delignification is kind
      | of a bit like organic aerogel. Aerogel is a foam of two
      | substances and we remove one. We are limited in the
      | structures that can be produced. Pore size and variability
      | and such.
      | 
      | Meanwhile we can an inferior carbon aerogel out of wood
      | that has enough surface to volume ratio to work as a
      | capacitor. And if we make them out of bamboo, they work
      | even better. Do other plants have a better structure? Can
      | we use nature or nurture to tune that? (eg, consistent
      | water/nutrients, or cyclical?).
      | 
      | The best wine comes from mature grapes suffering through a
      | dry spell.
 
| apienx wrote:
| The FTIR data is far from convincing (wrt the wood-PEDOT:PSS
| interaction), but cool demo.
| 
| Bra jobbat, Isak!
 
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| I was suddenly picturing a sleek gamer desktop with unsubtle RGB
| lighting and acrylic panels highlighting sumptuous walnut veneers
| on the motherboard, cabling insulated with the smoothest silk,
| and a delicate aroma of apple pipe tobacco emanating from the
| heat sink.
 
| tombert wrote:
| This is interesting; maybe the "organic semiconductors" that Jan
| Hendrik Schon was working on were plausible.
 
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