A direct wood-to-carbon-sponge transformation is realized via a facile chemical treatment and subsequent carbonization process. Removing the lignin and hemicellulose from balsa wood cell walls is a significant step toward converting the lattice-like wood structure to a spring-like lamellar structure. Magic transformation from brittle wood carbon to compressible wood carbon sponge thus becomes achievable. The wood carbon sponge exhibits a sensitive electrical response as a strain sensor and attractive features for other potential applications.
Transparent films or substrates are ubiquitously used in photonics and optoelectronics, with glass and plastics as traditional choice of materials. Transparent films made of cellulose nanofibers are reported recently. However, all these films are isotropic in nature. This work, for the first time, reports a remarkably facile and effective approach to fabricating anisotropic transparent films directly from wood. The resulting films exhibit an array of exceptional optical and mechanical properties. The well-aligned cellulose nanofibers in natural wood are maintained during delignification, leading to an anisotropic film with high transparency (≈90% transmittance) and huge intensity ratio of transmitted light up to 350%. The anisotropic film with well-aligned cellulose nanofibers has a mechanical tensile strength of up to 350 MPa, nearly three times of that of a film with randomly distributed cellulose nanofibers. Atomistic mechanics modeling further reveals the dependence of the film mechanical properties on the alignment of cellulose nanofibers through the film thickness direction. This study also demonstrates guided liquid transport in a mesoporous, anisotropic wood film and its possible application in enabling new nanoelectronic devices. These unique and highly desirable properties of the anisotropic transparent film can potentially open up a range of green electronics and nanofluidics.
Composite materials with ordered microstructures often lead to enhanced functionalities that a single material can hardly achieve. Many biomaterials with unusual microstructures can be found in nature; among them, many possess anisotropic and even directional physical and chemical properties. With inspiration from nature, artificial composite materials can be rationally designed to achieve this anisotropic behavior with desired properties. Here, a metallic wood with metal continuously filling the wood vessels is developed, which demonstrates excellent anisotropic electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties. The well-aligned metal rods are confined and separated by the wood vessels, which deliver directional electron transport parallel to the alignment direction. Thus, the novel metallic wood composite boasts an extraordinary anisotropic electrical conductivity (σ /σ ) in the order of 10 , and anisotropic thermal conductivity (κ /κ ) of 18. These values exceed the highest reported values in existing anisotropic composite materials. The anisotropic functionality of the metallic wood enables it to be used for thermal management applications, such as thermal insulation and thermal dissipation. The highly anisotropic metallic wood serves as an example for further anisotropic materials design; other composite materials with different biotemplates/hosts and fillers can achieve even higher anisotropic ratios, allowing them to be implemented in a variety of applications.
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