Self-densified super-strong wood
Dafang Huang, Jie Li, Suiyi Li, Jianbing Hu, Zhiru Cao, Yang Guo, Yu Ding, Mingwei Zhu, Yan‐Feng Chen
Abstract
Lightweight structural materials with high strength and toughness are highly desirable for many advanced applications. Wood, as a sustainable structural material, has been widely used in engineering due to its abundant availability and excellent mechanical properties. In this paper, we report a self-densification strategy to develop super-strong wood by reassembling orderly arranged wood fibers as functional units and self-densified without the need for hot pressing. The resulting self-densified wood exhibits ultra-high tensile strength (496.1 MPa), flexural strength (392.7 MPa) and impact toughness (75.2 kJ/m 2 ), surpassing those of compressed densified wood and traditional metal materials like aluminum alloys. Notably, the self-densified wood exhibits uniform shrinkage in the cross-section while maintaining its longitudinal dimension. This characteristic leads to an order-of-magnitude enhancement in the overall mechanical performance of the wood, presenting a significant advantage over compressed densified wood. Such super-strong yet lightweight wood has great potential for application as a sustainable engineering material, replacing traditional structural materials such as metals and alloys.