Abstract
Wood has unique advantages. However, the rigid structure and intrinsic insulating nature of wood limit its applications. Herein, a two-step process is developed to render wood veneers conductive and flexible. In the first step, most of the lignin and hemicellulose in the wood veneer are removed by hydrothermal treatment. In the second step, electroless Ni plating and subsequent pressing are carried out. The obtained Ni-plated veneer is flexible and bendable, and has a high tensile strength of 21.9 and 4.4 MPa along and across the channel direction, respectively, the former of which is considerably higher than that of carbon cloth and graphene foam. Moreover, this product exhibits high electrical conductivity around 1.1 × 103 S m−1, which is comparable to that of carbon cloth and graphene foam, and significantly outperforms previously reported wood-based conductors. This work reveals an effective strategy to transform cheap and renewable wood into a high value-added product that rivals expensive carbon cloth and graphene foam. The obtained product is particularly promising as a current collector for flexible and wearable electrochemical energy storage devices such as supercapacitors and Li-ion batteries.
Highlights
The research on wood-based functional materials is emerging as a cutting-edge field [1,2].As a raw material, wood is abundant, cheap, renewable, biodegradable, and possesses a porous structure
Natural balsa wood veneers with a size of around 30 × 20 × 1.1 mm were used as the starting material
The removal of lignin and hemicellulose can be verified by the 52.7% weight loss of the pristine veneer after hydrothermal treatment
Summary
The research on wood-based functional materials is emerging as a cutting-edge field [1,2].As a raw material, wood is abundant, cheap, renewable, biodegradable, and possesses a porous structure. The bottom-up strategy mainly refers to the controllable assembly of cellulose microfibrils, nanocrystals, and nanofibrils into structures of fiber [3], membrane [4], hydrogel [5,6,7], sponge/aerogel [8], etc., while the top-down strategy makes use of the unique structure of wood that encompasses nanoscale, microscale, and macroscale features [9] The latter strategy is deemed more efficient and cost-effective [9], and the obtained materials have shown great promise in the applications of electrochemical energy storage (EES) [10], transparent films [11], sensors [12], wave adsorption [13], solar steam generation [14], and so on
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