citybiz+ Clean Energy Startup InventWood Wins $20 Million Grant from DoE

InventWood, a Maryland startup bidding to reduce carbon footprint by developing stronger wood that can replace steel and concrete, has won a $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The College Park firm was one of eight developing clean energy technologies to win grants totaling $100 million under a program called ARPA-E SCALEUP.

“InventWood will contribute to the decarbonization of buildings and enable built structures to store significantly greater amounts of carbon by scaling up a game-changing wood material,” the Department of Energy said in a release. Its product, called MettleWood, is 60% stronger than construction grade steel and 80% lighter, and has the “potential to serve as a replacement for structural beams, columns, and connections that will ultimately result in significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions,” it added.

InventWood CEO Josh Cable said the grant would help the company build a pilot manufacturing facility for MettleWood. “A big thank you to all the folks who believed in us and helped us along the way! We are looking forward to growing InventWood to be a cellulose innovation powerhouse!” Cable, a former executive at the investing powerhouse Capital Group, said on LinkedIn.

Founded in 2016 by Prof. Liangbing Hu of the University of Maryland, InventWood has developed MettleWood, its flagship product. Current technology to “densify” wood primarily fails against humidity, often losing strength and even regaining its original size and shape. InventWood’s technology can “transform bulk natural wood directly into a high-performance structural material with a more than tenfold increase in strength, toughness and ballistic resistance and with greater dimensional stability,” the company’s researchers wrote in an article in Nature magazine.

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The technology’s first process is similar to making paper from wood, and involves partially removing lignin and hemicellulose. It then puts that wood through a process involving compression and heating, bringing great new strength to it. InventWood claims its finished product is three times denser than raw wood, 50 times more resistant to compression and almost 20 times as stiff. Most importantly, it was vastly more moisture-resistant than most forms of wood. In humidity tests, it swelled less than 10% over five days, and showed zero swelling when treated with a coat of paint.

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For good measure, InventWood’s product has been tested against bullets. In tests on a five-layer, plywood-like sandwich, the company’s product was able to stop simulated bullets. Hu has voiced the hope that InventWood could one day provide lower-grade armor at a mere 5% of the cost of a Kevlar sheet.

InventWood is also developing transparent wood that is touted as a more environmentally friendly alternative to glass. It is better at energy efficiency, meaning it will require less energy to either cool or warm indoors, or automobiles. Compared to glass, it is also lighter, shatter-proof, does not create glare and can be more easily recycled.