Abstract
Moisture plays a central role in the performance of wood products because it affects important material properties such as the resistance to decomposition, the mechanical properties, and the dimensions. To improve wood performance, a wide range of wood modification techniques that alter the wood chemistry in various ways have been described in the literature. Typically, these modifications aim to improve resistance to decomposition, dimensional stability, or, to introduce novel functionalities in the wood. However, wood modification techniques can also be an important tool to improve our understanding of the interactions between wood and moisture. In this review, we describe current knowledge gaps in our understanding of moisture in wood and how modification has been and could be used to clarify some of these gaps. This review shows that introducing specific chemical changes, and even controlling the distribution of these, in combination with the variety of experimental methods available for characterization of moisture in wood, could give novel insights into the interaction between moisture and wood. Such insights could further contribute to applications in several related fields of research such as how to enhance the resistance to decomposition, how to improve the performance of moisture-induced wooden actuators, or how to improve the utilization of wood biomass with challenging swelling anisotropy.
Highlights
Wood is a hygroscopic material that can take up water molecules from its surroundings
We focus on how wood modification has been and could be used to increase our fundamental understanding of the interactions between wood and moisture
The maximum moisture content for cell walls of many wood species is in the range 26–50% [46,47,49,50,70], and capillary water becomes increasingly dominant in the over-hygroscopic range
Summary
Wood is a hygroscopic material that can take up water molecules from its surroundings. Two-dimensional (2D) low-field NMR offers the possibility to separate the effects of chemical and physical environments Studies using this technique have found that there are two distinct populations of moisture within cell walls [59,61,62,63], which has been observed with. Much remains to be discovered about the factors controlling the equilibrium moisture content in the full moisture range as well as the interplay between water in different physical locations (cell walls, macro-voids) and chemical environments within these. Central to gaining new knowledge will be the use of complimentary experimental techniques to characterize the moisture as well as appropriate moisture conditioning to ensure a uniform distribution of moisture states within the wood
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