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by neomantra 398 days ago
Part of the strength is from Cellulose Nanocrystals (CNCs), which are modern (mid-01900's) and still being heavily researched. I was just at a conference where people were presenting work on making CNCs (and lots of other biomass conversion) more sustainable: H2O2 instead of SO4, greener versions of DMF like Cyrene, etc

My daughter recently started researching extracting/converting CNCs from fabric blends (currently cotton/elastane like spandex). Reading this post made me wonder if we can then remake fabric from CNCs, strong against knives or bullets?
1 comments
ghostly_s 398 days ago
> I was just at a conference where people were presenting work on making CNCs (and lots of other biomass conversion) more sustainable: H2O2 instead of SO4, greener versions of DMF like Cyrene, etc

This all sounds very interesting if you have any links!

link
neomantra 397 days ago
The conference was International Symposium on Green Chemistry [1], here's a previous HN comment I made [2], and here's a quick Dropbox-dump of my non-personal pics from there [3].

Many of the slides aren't available yet, but I'll try to curate some from photos. I'll put photo number from Dropbox, since they make direct-linking hard.

Photo 62 to 67 shows the H2O2 work from Mark Andrews' lab at McGill, being commercialized by a company called Anomera.

Photo 8 and 9 has a Cyrene whitepaper from Merck/Sigma-Aldrich. They did have presentations about it, but I don't have notes, will try to get from my daughter as she wants to try it for her process.

Photo 16 has a revisualized Periodic table of elements, logarithmically scaled by availability and color-coded with scarcity / conflict / need. We only have 100 years of Indium left and that was sorta worthless >20 years ago and now used in every touchscreen. had photo but put source link instead [4]

Photo 2 shows that we are now man-making stuff at a greater rate than the earth is creating stuff and that is rapidly increasing. The point there was that we will keep doing this, so we need to make it sustainable and circular. Photo 5 shows how FUBAR'd we are.

Happy to try to answer other questions, but noting I'm not a chemist but a chaperone, so I'll have to ask other people.

[1] https://www.isgc-symposium.com

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43974375

[3] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/5u8xmvcxv5x1zyzaq0jxu/APJPtEo...

[4] https://www.euchems.eu/euchems-periodic-table/

link