Abstract
Mimicking natural structures allows the exploitation of proven design concepts for advanced material solutions. Here, our inspiration comes from the anisotropic closed cell structure of wood. The bubbles in our fiber reinforced foam are elongated using temperature dependent viscosity of methylcellulose and constricted drying. The oriented structures lead to high yield stress in the primary direction; 64 times larger than compared to the cross direction. The closed cells of the foam also result in excellent thermal insulation. The proposed novel foam manufacturing process is trivial to up-scale from the laboratory trial scale towards production volumes on industrial scales.
Highlights
Mimicking natural structures allows the exploitation of proven design concepts for advanced material solutions
We examine the foam block structure using Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM)
We find that the distribution of acoustic emission energies is power-law distributed spanning five to six decades in energy (Fig. 3D)
Summary
Mimicking natural structures allows the exploitation of proven design concepts for advanced material solutions. Wood is an example of such a material to copy: it is lightweight, strong, and can be used as raw material for many purposes that require mechanical or insulating properties These features originate from the structure of wood, its closed anisotropic cellular g eometry[4]. The idea to mimic highly anisotropic wood structure to intentionally introduce extreme anisotropy to foams allowing one to control their mechanical properties has recently been successfully applied to, for instance bio[6], carbon nanotube[7], crosslinked HDPE, and natural r ubber[8] based foams. We present an scalable novel process for the production of bio-based anisotropic foams and show that the solid foams obtained possess mechanical properties exhibiting directional anisotropy and complex response to loading. The proposed process differs significantly from the freeze-casted or aerogel production by its ability to scale up even to a large paper machine level
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