Utilizing natural grids structure of thin wood slices as alternative products to commercial TEM grids

Abstract

Wood as renewable and earth-abundant biomass material, has attracted much research interest revolving around the utilization of its natural pore structure recently. The highly ordered microtexture of wood has been used to design multitudinous functional products which offer good potential for high value utilization of wood resource. Here, a novel application has been developed by using thin wood slice with transparent grid structure to fabricate TEM grids, which could entirely replace commercially products in TEM observation and even widen their application condition. Wood slice with simple inclusions removal process was used as holey grids directly, and a facile method was employed to uniformly cover graphene oxide/polyvinyl formal films on wood slice skeleton as holeless TEM grids. It has been proved that both the fabricated holey and holeless TEM grids are successfully applied to clearly observing the morphology and structure of nano-materials from zero dimension, one dimension to two dimensions. Meanwhile, it demonstrates wooden TEM grids are feasible in strong corrosive sample preparation condition, while commonly used TEM grids are impracticable. The designed TEM grids substitute material has the obvious superiorities in preparation process, low cost, corrosion resistance, hydrophilicity, environment and biocompatibility. The utilization of thin wood slice for TEM grids products also expanded the application field of wood and is very promising to be commercial products.