Superwood structures designed and tested by Prof. Alan Luo and grad student Matt Hartsfield featured in Science publication
Professor Alan Luo, Director of the Lightweight Materials and Manufacturing Research Laboratory, and MSE grad student Matt Hartsfield are members of a multi-university team that has developed a process of shaping flat wood into three-dimensional structures, which are six times stronger than when in its original form.
Until now, the limited formability of wood excluded it from most structural applications requiring high mechanical strength. The team's cell wall engineering process manipulates the intrinsic microstructure of flat wood to create a flexible, moldable wood. They developed a sequence of delignifying, or removing organic polymers in the cell walls of wood, drying and wetting the wood to create a cell wall that is moldable, stiff and strong enough to compete with polymers, metals and composites used in advanced engineering, like vehicle-based applications. Luo and Hartsfield designed the Al-wood honeycomb-Al sandwich structure and conducted compression and bending tests to determine the superwood's mechanical strength. The team's paper, "Lightweight, strong, moldable wood via cell wall engineering as a sustainable structural material", was featured in the October 22 issue of Science [Shaoliang Xiao et al., Science 374:465 (2021)].
The ARPA-E-funded project was led by Professor Liangbing Hu of the University of Maryland.
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The information, data, or work presented in the article was funded in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), US Department of Energy, under award DE-AR0001025.
