Miniature furniture 3D printed using ink made from recycled wood

Recycled wood might be changed into an ink for 3D printing, which may supply a extra sustainable method to manufacture furniture and even construct homes.

“Wood has been used for building and structural purposes for centuries,” says Muhammad Rahman at Rice University in Texas. But working with the fabric isn’t particularly environment friendly, as chiselling it all the way down to dimension can lead to a lot of waste.

To make use of this leftover materials, Rahman and his colleagues break up it into lignin and cellulose – molecules which are key to the stiff construction of wood – and these have been damaged all the way down to kind nanofibres and nanocrystals. They then recombined the cellulose and lignin with water to make a clay-like substance that might be used as an ink.

The researchers used this substance to 3D print objects by forcing it by a nozzle and build up layers of ink.

To increase the power of the 3D-printed objects, the group freeze-dried them to take away moisture after which rapidly heated them as much as 180°C (356°F) to make the lignin soften and fuse with the cellulose.

“We can actually mimic all the visual, textural and olfactory properties of natural wood,” says Rahman. The product was discovered to be almost six instances extra sturdy than pure balsa wood in compression checks, and as much as thrice as versatile in bending checks.

So far, the researchers have managed to create miniature furniture and honeycomb constructions using the ink, however they hope it may finally be used to construct bigger objects, resembling homes.

“We need to rethink how we can make structures without cutting down trees,” says Rahman. “If we can recycle waste wood using 3D printing instead of conventional manufacturing, that would be a good step forward.”