Mingwei Zhu

Highly Anisotropic, Highly Transparent Wood Composites

For the first time, two types of highly anisotropic, highly transparent wood composites are demonstrated by taking advantage of the macro-structures in original wood. These wood composites are highly transparent with a total transmittance up to 90% but exhibit dramatically different optical and mechanical properties.

Mesoporous, Three-Dimensional Wood Membrane Decorated with Nanoparticles for Highly Efficient Water Treatment

Wood, an earth-abundant material, is widely used in our everyday life. With its mesoporous structure, natural wood is comprised of numerous long, partially aligned channels (lumens) as well as nanochannels that stretch along its growth direction. This wood mesostructure is suitable for a range of emerging applications, especially as a membrane/separation material. Here, we report a mesoporous, three-dimensional (3D) wood membrane decorated with palladium nanoparticles (Pd NPs/wood membrane) for efficient wastewater treatment. The 3D Pd NPs/wood membrane possesses the following advantages: (1) the uniformly distributed lignin within the wood mesostructure can effectively reduce Pd(II) ions to Pd NPs; (2) cellulose, with its abundant hydroxyl groups, can immobilize Pd NPs; (3) the partially aligned mesoporous wood channels as well as their inner ingenious microstructures increase the likelihood of wastewater contacting Pd NPs decorating the wood surface; (4) the long, Pd NP-decorated channels facilitate bulk treatment as water flows through the entire mesoporous wood membrane. As a proof of concept, we demonstrated the use and efficiency of a Pd NPs/wood membrane to remove methylene blue (MB, C16H18N3ClS) from a flowing aqueous solution. The turnover frequency of the Pd NPs/wood membrane, ∼2.02 molMB·molPd-1·min-1, is much higher than the values reported in the literature. The water treatment rate of the 3D Pd NPs/wood membrane can reach 1 × 105 L·m-2·h-1 with a high MB removal efficiency (>99.8%). The 3D mesoporous wood membrane with partially aligned channels exhibits promising results for wastewater treatment and is applicable for an even wider range of separation applications.

Tree-Inspired Design for High-Efficiency Water Extraction

The solar steam process, akin to the natural water cycle, is considered to be an attractive approach to address water scarcity issues globally. However, water extraction from groundwater, for example, has not been demonstrated using these existing technologies. Additionally, there are major unaddressed challenges in extracting potable water from seawater including salt accumulation and long-term evaporation stability, which warrant further investigation. Herein, a high-performance solar steam device composed entirely of natural wood is reported. The pristine, natural wood is cut along the transverse direction and the top surface is carbonized to create a unique bilayer structure. This tree-inspired design offers distinct advantages for water extraction, including rapid water transport and evaporation in the mesoporous wood, high light absorption (≈99%) within the surface carbonized open wood channels, a low thermal conductivity to avoid thermal loss, and cost effectiveness. The device also exhibits long-term stability in seawater without salt accumulation as well as high performance for underground water extraction. The tree-inspired design offers an inexpensive and scalable solar energy harvesting and steam generation technology that can provide clean water globally, especially for rural or remote areas where water is not only scarce but also limited by water extraction materials and methods.

Light management in plastic–paper hybrid substrate towards high-performance optoelectronics

Optoelectronic devices are ubiquitously built on substrates. To increase the efficiencies of light coupling into and out of optoelectronic devices, such as thin film solar cells and flexible lighting, a substrate with high transmittance and high haze is desired. Unfortunately, optical transmittance and optical haze are usually contrasting to each other in common substrates: plastic is highly transparent but with a low optical haze, whereas paper has a high optical haze but a low total transmittance. Herein, we combine these two materials through a simple templated infiltration approach to achieve a new type of substrate, plastic–paper, which has a high optical transmittance (>85%) and high transmittance haze (>90%) in a broadband wavelength. The plastic–paper has an ultra-flat surface, is mechanically flexible, durable in different solvents and compatible with standard processing in semiconductors, which are shown by organic light emitting diodes (OLED) fabricated directly onto the plastic–paper substrate. Plastic–paper leads to improved light coupling into and out of optoelectronic devices and demonstrates an improvement in efficiency for both OLED and typical GaAs solar cells. The fabrication method is also fully scalable with roll-to-roll production. The newly developed low-cost, high-performance transparent and hazy substrate is attractive for a range of optoelectronic devices.

Processing bulk natural wood into a high-performance structural material

Synthetic structural materials with exceptional mechanical performance suffer from either large weight and adverse environmental impact (for example, steels and alloys) or complex manufacturing processes and thus high cost (for example, polymer-based and biomimetic composites). Natural wood is a low-cost and abundant material and has been used for millennia as a structural material for building and furniture construction. However, the mechanical performance of natural wood (its strength and toughness) is unsatisfactory for many advanced engineering structures and applications. Pre-treatment with steam, heat, ammonia or cold rolling followed by densification has led to the enhanced mechanical performance of natural wood. However, the existing methods result in incomplete densification and lack dimensional stability, particularly in response to humid environments, and wood treated in these ways can expand and weaken. Here we report a simple and effective strategy to 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. Our two-step process involves the partial removal of lignin and hemicellulose from the natural wood via a boiling process in an aqueous mixture of NaOH and Na2SO3 followed by hot-pressing, leading to the total collapse of cell walls and the complete densification of the natural wood with highly aligned cellulose nanofibres. This strategy is shown to be universally effective for various species of wood. Our processed wood has a specific strength higher than that of most structural metals and alloys, making it a low-cost, high-performance, lightweight alternative.

Anisotropic, Transparent Films with Aligned Cellulose Nanofibers

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.

A High-Performance, Low-Tortuosity Wood-Carbon Monolith Reactor

A highly efficient 3D wood-derived carbon monolith reactor with a low tortuosity is demonstrated for high-temperature reaction applications, using catalytic steam reforming of biomass tar as the model system. Outstanding catalytic activity is achieved as the reactant gases flow through this 3D natural wood-derived catalyst, where over 99% toluene conversion and good stability at 700 °C are observed.

Highly Anisotropic Conductors

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 1011 , 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.

Isotropic Paper Directly from Anisotropic Wood: Top-Down Green Transparent Substrate Toward Biodegradable Electronics

Flexible electronics have found useful applications in both the scientific and industrial communities. However, substrates traditionally used for flexible electronics, such as plastic, cause many environmental issues. Therefore, a transparent substrate made from natural materials provides a promising alternative because it can be degraded in nature. The traditional bottom-up fabrication method for transparent paper is expensive, environmentally unfriendly, and time-consuming. In this work, for the first time, we developed a top-down method to fabricate isotropic, transparent paper directly from anisotropic wood. The top-down method includes two steps: a delignification process to bleach the wood by lignin removal and a pressing process for removing light-reflecting and -scattering sources. The resulting isotropic, transparent paper has high transmittance of about 90% and high haze over 80% and is demonstrated as a nature-disposable substrate for electronic/optical devices. Adjusting the pressing ratio used changes the density of the resulting paper, which tunes the microstructure-related properties of the isotropic, transparent paper. This top-down method is simple, fast, environmentally friendly, and cost-effective, which can greatly promote the development of paper-based green optical and electronic devices.