Scientists and engineers are developing high-performance materials from eco-friendly sources like plant waste.
Scientists and engineers are developing high-performance materials from eco-friendly sources like plant waste. A key component, lignocellulose – found in wood and many plants – can be easily collected and chemically modified to improve its properties.
By using these kinds of chemical changes, researchers are creating advanced materials and new ways to design and build sustainably. With about 181.5 billion tons of wood produced globally each year, it’s one of the largest renewable material sources.
Researchers from the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University, and collaborators from the University of Miami and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, wanted to find out if adding extremely hard minerals at the nanoscale could make the walls of wood cells stronger – without making the wood heavy, expensive or bad for the environment. Few studies have investigated how treated wood performs at different scales, and none have successfully strengthened entire pieces of wood by incorporating inorganic minerals directly into the cell walls.
The research team focused on a special type of hardwood known as ring-porous wood, which comes from broad-leaf trees like oak, maple, cherry and walnut. These trees feature large, ring-shaped vessels in the wood that transport water from the roots to the leaves. For the study, researchers used red oak, a common hardwood in North America, and introduced an iron compound into the wood through a simple chemical reaction. By mixing ferric nitrate with potassium hydroxide, they created ferrihydrite, an iron oxide mineral commonly found in soil and water.
Read more at Florida Atlantic University
Image: A microCT image that shows the distribution of the iron mineral in the wood cell wall (in turquoise). (Credit: Florida Atlantic University)
