Wood Nanostructure Control for Efficient Energy Conversion

Research focuses shift back to biomaterials ascribing to the increasing energy crisis and environmental concern. Sustainable energy conversion and storage is one of the most influenced fields. Wood is attractive in this context due to its advanced hierarchical structure including anisotropic multi-scale pores benefiting directional diffusion. However, the wood structure is not optimized. E.g. micro meter scale pores are not efficient for maximized surface interactions. Therefore, more effort should be put into wood structure tailoring. In this presentation, wood structure tailoring strategies will be introduced for efficient energy conversion including hierarchical catalyst synthesis^[1] for water splitting and wood cell wall nanostructure reconstruction for hydrovoltaic energy harvesting^[2,3]. The wood structure development during the treatments as well as further applications will be discussed in detail.<br/><br/>References<br/>[1] X. Sheng, Y. Li, T. Yang, B. J. J. Timmer, T. Willhammar, O. Cheung, L. Li, C. J. Brett, S. V. Roth, B. Zhang, L. Fan, Y. Guo, X. Zou, L. Berglund, L. Sun, <i>Appl Catal B</i> <b>2020</b>, <i>264</i>, 118536.<br/>[2] Y. Gao, X. Yang, J. Garemark, R. T. Olsson, H. Dai, F. Ram, Y. Li, <i>ACS Sustain Chem Eng</i> <b>2023</b>, <i>11</i>, 11099.<br/>[3] J. Garemark, F. Ram, L. Liu, I. Sapouna, M. F. Cortes Ruiz, P. T. Larsson, Y. Li, <i>Adv Funct Mater</i> <b>2023</b>, 33(4): 2208933.