Wood-Derived Materials for Green Electronics, Biological Devices, and Energy Applications

Abstract

With the arising of global climate change and resource shortage, in recent years, increased attention has been paid to environmentally friendly materials. Trees are sustainable and renewable materials, which give us shelter and oxygen and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Trees are a primary resource that human society depends upon every day, for example, homes, heating, furniture, and aircraft. Wood from trees gives us paper, cardboard, and medical supplies, thus impacting our homes, school, work, and play. All of the above-mentioned applications have been well developed over the past thousands of years. However, trees and wood have much more to offer us as advanced materials, impacting emerging high-tech fields, such as bioengineering, flexible electronics, and clean energy. Wood naturally has a hierarchical structure, composed of well-oriented microfibers and tracheids for water, ion, and oxygen transportation during metabolism. At higher magnification, the walls of fiber cells have an interesting morphology-a distinctly mesoporous structure. Moreover, the walls of fiber cells are composed of thousands of fibers (or macrofibrils) oriented in a similar angle. Nanofibrils and nanocrystals can be further liberated from macrofibrils by mechanical, chemical, and enzymatic methods. The obtained nanocellulose has unique optical, mechanical, and barrier properties and is an excellent candidate for chemical modification and reconfiguration. Wood is naturally a composite material, comprised of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin. Wood is sustainable, earth abundant, strong, biodegradable, biocompatible, and chemically accessible for modification; more importantly, multiscale natural fibers from wood have unique optical properties applicable to different kinds of optoelectronics and photonic devices. Today, the materials derived from wood are ready to be explored for applications in new technology areas, such as electronics, biomedical devices, and energy. The goal of this study is to review the fundamental structures and chemistries of wood and wood-derived materials, which are essential for a wide range of existing and new enabling technologies. The scope of the review covers multiscale materials and assemblies of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin as well as other biomaterials derived from wood, in regard to their major emerging applications. Structure-properties-application relationships will be investigated in detail. Understanding the fundamental properties of these structures is crucial for designing and manufacturing products for emerging applications. Today, a more holistic understanding of the interplay between the structure, chemistry, and performance of wood and wood-derived materials is advancing historical applications of these materials. This new level of understanding also enables a myriad of new and exciting applications, which motivate this review. There are excellent reviews already on the classical topic of woody materials, and some recent reviews also cover new understanding of these mate...

Recent Strategies in Preparation of Cellulose Nanocrystals and Cellulose Nanofibrils Derived from Raw Cellulose Materials

“…They have been applied in the fields of biomedical engineering, food, sensor, packaging, optical and electronic devices, and so on [8][9][10]. Previous reviews have summarized their source, chemistry, and applications [2,[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. The present review mainly focuses on the advances in preparation of CNCs and CNFs in order to display a clear development direction for the preparation of CNCs and CNFs.…”

Thickness difference induced pore structure variations in cellulosic separators for lithium-ion batteries

“…One of the most studied and utilized alternative materials is cellulose, due to its abundance, thermal stability, hydrophilicity and low cost (Carlsson et al 2014;Mihranyan 2011;Pan et al 2016;Wang et al 2014;Xiao et al 2014;Zhu et al 2016;Zolin et al 2015). It has been reported that cellulose/polysulfonamide composite separators exhibit good wettabilities and high thermal stabilities (Xu et al 2014b) and that cellulose membranes produced by force spinning of cellulose acetate also exhibit good wettabilities, high porosities and high ionic conductivities (Weng et al 2015).…”

Benchmarking Cellulose Nanocrystals: From the Laboratory to Industrial Production

“…23 The literature commonly presents CNCs as reinforcing agents in nanocomposites, rheological modifiers/stabilizers, and as additives in biomedical devices; these and many other applications are described in a number of comprehensive review papers. 9,18,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29] In addition to their high aspect ratio and large surface area, CNCs have unique physical properties, such as their ability to self-assemble into chiral nematic liquid crystalline phases, [30][31][32][33] align in magnetic [34][35][36][37][38][39] and electric fields, [40][41][42] and exhibit piezoelectric reponsivity. 43 Our work on CNCs has primarily focused on developing hybrid nanomaterials such as films, aerogels, and liquid formulated products.…”