The quest for both strength and toughness is perpetual in advanced material design; unfortunately, these two mechanical properties are generally mutually exclusive. So far there exists only limited success of attaining both strength and toughness, which often needs material-specific, complicated, or expensive synthesis processes and thus can hardly be applicable to other materials. A general mechanism to address the conflict between strength and toughness still remains elusive. Here we report a first-of-its-kind study of the dependence of strength and toughness of cellulose nanopaper on the size of the constituent cellulose fibers. Surprisingly, we find that both the strength and toughness of cellulose nanopaper increase simultaneously (40 and 130 times, respectively) as the size of the constituent cellulose fibers decreases (from a mean diameter of 27 μm to 11 nm), revealing an anomalous but highly desirable scaling law of the mechanical properties of cellulose nanopaper: the smaller, the stronger and the tougher. Further fundamental mechanistic studies reveal that reduced intrinsic defect size and facile (re)formation of strong hydrogen bonding among cellulose molecular chains is the underlying key to this new scaling law of mechanical properties. These mechanistic findings are generally applicable to other material building blocks, and therefore open up abundant opportunities to use the fundamental bottom-up strategy to design a new class of functional materials that are both strong and tough.strength | toughness | scaling law | cellulose | hydrogen bond

Functional load-bearing materials based on phase-change materials (PCMs) are under rapid development for thermal energy storage (TES) applications. Mesoporous structures are ideal carriers for PCMs and guarantee shape stability during the thermal cycle. In this study, we introduce transparent wood (TW) as a TES system. A shape-stabilized PCM based on polyethylene glycol is encapsulated into a delignified wood substrate, and the TW obtained is fully characterized, also in terms of nano-and mesoscale structures. Transparent wood for thermal energy storage (TW-TES) combines large latent heat (∼76 J g −1 ) with switchable optical transparency. During the heating process, optical transmittance increases by 6% and reaches 68% for 1.5 mm thick TW-TES. Characterization of the thermal energy regulation performance shows that the prepared TW-TES composite is superior to normal glass because of the combination of good heat-storage and thermal insulation properties. This makes TW-TES composites interesting candidates for applications in energy-saving buildings.

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