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by Animats
1427 days ago
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Oh, that thing. The hemp fans kept trying to get that into Wikipedia years ago. It ended up at "soybean car". In the early days of plastics, cost was high and phenolic plastics were brittle. So there were many attempts to add some kind of cheap filler material. Sawdust, agricultural waste, etc. This sort of worked. Not too well. Adding a filler which absorbed water caused the material to bulge when wet. Not too good for auto body panels. The real frontier in this area is finding uses for agricultural waste - stuff that's a byproduct of growing food. Rice hulls. (Sometimes used to make rice paper.) Corn cobs. Bagasse, the waste from extracting sugar from sugar cane. (Sometimes used to make oriented strand board.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean_car |
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duroplast
There's an interesting passage in this Wikipedia article, regarding its limitations in industrial use:
> Because it can be made in a press similar to shaping steel, it is more suitable for volume car production than fiberglass. However, in comparison to shaping steel, duroplast needs much more time for hardening in the press. This was one of the reasons why it was not possible to scale-up production of Trabant to the volume that was demanded.
(I guess, the same may be true for other organic filler materials, e.g., hemp.)
Edit: While the German edition of Wikipedia doesn't mention the Trabant in the context of duroplast at all, the entry on the Trabant cites a curing time of about 20 hours.