Abstract
Nowadays, energy-saving building materials are important for reducing indoor energy consumption by enabling better thermal insulation, promoting effective sunlight harvesting and offering comfortable indoor lighting. Here, we demonstrate a novel scalable aesthetic transparent wood (called aesthetic wood hereafter) with combined aesthetic features (e.g. intact wood patterns), excellent optical properties (an average transmittance of ~ 80% and a haze of ~ 93%), good UV-blocking ability, and low thermal conductivity (0.24 W m−1K−1) based on a process of spatially selective delignification and epoxy infiltration. Moreover, the rapid fabrication process and mechanical robustness (a high longitudinal tensile strength of 91.95 MPa and toughness of 2.73 MJ m−3) of the aesthetic wood facilitate good scale-up capability (320 mm × 170 mm × 0.6 mm) while saving large amounts of time and energy. The aesthetic wood holds great potential in energy-efficient building applications, such as glass ceilings, rooftops, transparent decorations, and indoor panels.
Highlights
Nowadays, energy-saving building materials are important for reducing indoor energy consumption by enabling better thermal insulation, promoting effective sunlight harvesting and offering comfortable indoor lighting
Numerous merits are endowed to the transparent wood composites including light weight, high optical transmittance, tunable haze, low thermal conductivity compared to glass and excellent mechanical robustness[8,9,10]
The novel concept of aesthetic wood in this work is demonstrated for the first time possessing integrated excellent functions of optical transparency, UV-blocking, thermal insulation, mechanical strength, scalability, and aesthetics
Summary
Energy-saving building materials are important for reducing indoor energy consumption by enabling better thermal insulation, promoting effective sunlight harvesting and offering comfortable indoor lighting. The nano- and macro-features of original wood were essentially preserved as well (Supplementary Fig. 3), including the wood patterns to show the nature of aesthetics.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.