Are you able to weld wooden? It kind of feels like a foolish query — in the event you throw a few items of oak at the welding desk and whip out the TIG torch, you realize not anything goes to occur. However as [Action Lab] displays us within the video under, welding wooden is technically conceivable, if no longer very sensible.
Since experiments like this every so often attempt to stretch issues just a little, it most likely will pay to outline welding as a procedure that melts two fabrics at their interface and fuses them in combination because the molten subject matter solidifies. That would appear to pose an issue for wooden, which simply burns when heated. However as [Action Lab] issues out, it’s the unstable gases launched from wooden as it’s heated that in truth burn, and the herbal polymers which are decomposed by means of the warmth to unlock those gases have a tumbler transition temperature similar to every other polymer. You simply must warmth wooden sufficient to achieve that temperature with out in truth bursting the wooden into flames.
His solution is likely one of the oldest applied sciences we’ve: rubbing two sticks in combination. By way of chucking a hardwood peg right into a hand drill and spinning it right into a quite undersized hollow in a stick of oak, he created sufficient warmth and force to partly soften the polymers on the interface. When allowed to chill, the polymers fuse in combination, and voila! Welded wooden. Reducing his welded wooden alongside the joint unearths a skinny layer of subject matter that clearly underwent a segment exchange, so he dug into this phenomenon just a little and came upon analysis into melting and welding wooden, which concludes that the melted subject matter is essentially lignin, a phenolic biopolymer discovered within the cellular partitions of wooden.
[Action Lab] follows up with an experiment the place he heats bent wooden in a vacuum chamber with a laser to fasten the bend in position. The experiment was once fairly much less convincing however were given us fascinated with alternative ways to exclude oxygen from the “weld pool,” comparable to flooding the world with argon. That’s precisely what’s finished in TIG welding, in spite of everything.
