Abstract
Transparent wood biocomposites based on PMMA combine high optical transmittance with excellent mechanical properties. One hypothesis is that despite poor miscibility the polymer is distributed at the nanoscale inside the cell wall. Small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) experiments are performed to test this hypothesis, using biocomposites based on deuterated PMMA and "contrast-matched"PMMA. The wood cell wall nanostructure soaked in heavy water is quantified in terms of the correlation distance d between the center of elementary cellulose fibrils. For wood/deuterated PMMA, this distance d is very similar as for wood/heavy water (correlation peaks at q ≈ 0.1 Å-1). The peak disappears when contrast-matched PMMA is used, indeed proving nanoscale polymer distribution in the cell wall. The specific processing method used for transparent wood explains the nanocomposite nature of the wood cell wall and can serve as a nanotechnology for cell wall impregnation of polymers in large wood biocomposite structures.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 2883-2890 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Nano Letters |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue number | 7 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 14 2021 |
Funding
P.C. thanks Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation (No. 2204096) and Beijing Institute of Technology Research Fund Program for Young Scholars and BIT-Belarus joint grant. The European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant funding under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement 742733) is acknowledged for L.A.B., S.V.P., H.O., and Q.Z. acknowledge the support of the Genomic Science Program, Office of Biological and Environmental Research (OBER), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), under Contract FWP ERKP752 for this research. The SANS studies on Bio-SANS (IPTS-18951.1) were supported by the OBER funded Center for Structural Molecular Biology (CSMB) under Contract FWP ERKP291, using the High Flux Isotope Reactor supported by the Basic Energy Sciences, Department of Energy. We thank Dr. Isabelle Morfin, Dr. Nathalie Boudet, and Dr. Nils Blanc for assistance at the D2AM beamline, and ESRF for providing beamtimes. The WOS detector was funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) under the "‘Investissements d"avenir’’ program with Grant ANR-11-EQPX-0010. We thank Dr. Lin Yang for the help in X-ray scattering data reduction. The LiX beamline is part of the Center for BioMolecular Structure (CBMS), which is primarily supported by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) through a P30 Grant (P30GM133893) and by the DOE Office of Biological and Environmental Research (KP1605010). LiX also received additional support from NIH Grant S10 OD012331. As part of NSLS-II, a national user facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory, work performed at the CBMS is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences Program under contract number DE-SC0012704. NSLS-II is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE office of Science by Brookhaven National Laboratory under contract no. DE-SC0012704. Jonas Garemark is acknowledged for the help with wood cellular structure drawing.
Keywords
- Biocomposites
- Neutron Scattering
- Wood Nanotechnology
