Abstract
Intelligent responsive materials have become one of the most exciting fields in the research of new materials in the past few decades due to their practical and potential applications in aerospace, biomedicine, textile, electronics, and other relative fields. Here, a novel thermal-responsive biomimetic shape memory wood composite is fabricated utilizing polycaprolactone-based (PCL) shape-memory polymer to modify treated-wood. The shape memory wood inherits visual characteristics and the unique three-dimension structure of natural wood that endows the shape memory wood (SMW) with outstanding tensile strength (10.68 MPa) at room temperature. In terms of shape memory performance, the shape recovery ratio is affected by multiple factors including environment temperature, first figuration angle, cycle times, and shows different variation tendency, respectively. Compared with shape recovery ratio, the shape fixity ratio (96%) is relatively high and stable. This study supplies more possibilities for the functional applications of wood, such as biomimetic architecture, self-healing wood veneering, and intelligent furniture.
Highlights
Wood is a natural renewable material that has been widely used in all works of life due to the excellent mechanical properties and friendly environment characteristics
We investigated the process-mechanism-properties of shape memory wood (SMW), and found that Shape-memory polymers (SMP) was well injected into the mesoporous structure in wood, and formed a cross-linking system
Depending on the glassy transition of lignin, natural wood has a certain shape memory effect, where temperature control and moisture content are essential for fixing natural wood deformation
Summary
Wood is a natural renewable material that has been widely used in all works of life due to the excellent mechanical properties and friendly environment characteristics. Steel, cement, and other structural material, wood has unique mesoporous and hierarchical structure stemming in its biological origin, which makes it inherit wood material characteristics such as high ratio of strength to weight, certain viscoelasticity, and anisotropy. Shape-memory polymers (SMP), one type of smart materials, can deform from the temporary shape to the permanent shape under external stimuli (mainly including heat [12,13], light [14], electric [15], magnetic fields [16], water/solvent [17]), where performance had been programmed before triggering [18,19], and that it has common advantages of polymer: High elastic deformation, low Polymers 2019, 11, 1892; doi:10.3390/polym11111892 www.mdpi.com/journal/polymers
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