‘Bullet-proof’ wood developed
Chemical treatment makes ‘densified’ wood 10 times tougher than its natural counterpart
A way of turning natural wood into an ultra-dense material that is strong enough to stop a bullet has been developed by scientists in the US. The team behind it say it could be used as an eco-friendly yet high performance building material, or even as a new kind of body armour. ‘Our process enables the complete collapse of the voids and pits in natural wood, thus substantially reducing defects and leading to a significantly higher strength,’ says Liangbing Hu at the University of Maryland, US, who developed the ‘densified’ wood together with colleagues.