Friday, March 14, 2014
Wood foam may be a new form of green home insulation
www.gizmag.com: Insulating your home may help the environment by lowering your energy usage, but unfortunately the petroleum-based foam that's typically used as insulation isn't all that eco-friendly itself. Researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Wood Research, however, have developed a reportedly greener alternative that they claim works just as well – it's foam made from wood.
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6 comments:
This stuff is actually really cool, because a lot of the available biofoams (the foams that claim to be green) are made of only about 20% renewable materials. Specifically, soy foam is about 20% and the other 80% is divided between chemicals and petroleum. This wood foam, however, seems to be pretty much entirely wood, which is somewhat renewable. I would imagine as it comes to market, producers will start using chemicals that replace the wood or cause it to dry faster or whatever. But for now, this seems like an excellent alternative to a lot of the other biofoams out there.
I’m really tired of talking about foam, but this is a pretty cool topic. This product makes a case for sustainability, but I think it’s real potential as a shop material stems from safety. The MSDS on wood dust isn’t great, but it’s better than the MSDS on pink foam.
While this foam is more porous than the pink foams we tend to use for scenic art, with the right sealant I wonder if it wouldn’t perform as well (or even better) as petroleum based foams.
I think perhaps the process of manufacturing wood foam might also be much simpler than that of the soy “Biofoam” variety of foams. Perhaps this is much more likely to catch on.
I'm interested in how this board is produced and whether or not it's just a variant of the fiberboard family of sheet goods. From the description, it seems as though it could be related to low density fiberboard but with an added step of gas infusion. I'm also curious to see the density if the product, how it acts with CBC routing, as well as if it could be laser cut safely unlike its petroleum counterpart. I'm excited to see where this goes.
While in its current state, it seemed like it would have to be made into sheets before hand and then cut to fit into insulation on sight, producing a significant amount of waste anyway, once the technology reaches a stage where is can be pumped into an enclosure to fill a preexisting space i think it will fare much better as a viable insulation material. In terms our (the theater's) use of the foam, it would be very interesting to see how rigid or strong it is, and if it could be used for sculptural or carving purposes.
Well wood is definitely a better more eco friendly building material than petroleum and like Ruben said this foam is made entirely out of wood instead of just a portion of it being wood. I do wonder how it compares structurally because as Frank says it is much more porous than studio foam. The real question is if this can be made from recycled wood fibers and if not how many trees does it take to make a respectable amount of foam.
This is pretty neat. I am curious what properties it inherits from wood based products and which from foam products. It could make a neat scene and prop building material, combining the best properties of woods and foams. The one property that seems the most useful, is that I would guess that it can be spray painted and treated with other aerosols which pink foam cannot.
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