Wood-Based Functional Materials for Electronic Applications

Green electronics, derived from renewable and biodegradable sources, play a significant role in progressing toward sustainable and circular products. Wood, a renewable resource, has gained increasing attention due to concerns over resource depletion and efforts to mitigate climate change. In addition to its renewability, wood’s hierarchical structure offers significant potential for developing functional materials. The hierarchical porous structure of wood serves as a well-suited scaffold for embedding functional agents, resulting in functional materials for a variety of engineering applications.
The main concept to be discussed in the presentation involves utilizing wood's inherent structure in a top-down method, which contrasts with the bottom-up approach of assembling wood’s disintegrated cell wall components. Chemical treatments and processing techniques are developed to equip wood-based materials with new functions.
This presentation will provide an overview of the recent progress made by the Wood Materials Science group at ETH Zurich in the field of wood–based electronics. Specifically, we will explore developments in wood-based piezoelectric and triboelectric nanogenerators [1-3], laser–induced graphitization of wood surfaces [4, 5], and chemiluminescent wood [6, 7]. After critically reviewing these advancements, we will address remaining challenges, with the aim of inspiring future innovations in wood-based electronics.

References:
[1] Sun, Jianguo, Urs Schütz, Kunkun Tu, Sophie Marie Koch, Günther Roman, Sandro Stucki, Feng Chen et al. "Scalable and sustainable wood for efficient mechanical energy conversion in buildings via triboelectric effects." Nano Energy 102 (2022): 107670.
[2] Sun, Jianguo, Kunkun Tu, Simon Büchele, Sophie Marie Koch, Yong Ding, Shivaprakash N. Ramakrishna, Sandro Stucki et al. "Functionalized wood with tunable tribopolarity for efficient triboelectric nanogenerators." Matter 4, no. 9 (2021): 3049-3066.
[3] Sun, Jianguo, Hengyu Guo, Javier Ribera, Changsheng Wu, Kunkun Tu, Marco Binelli, Guido Panzarasa, Francis WMR Schwarze, Zhong Lin Wang, and Ingo Burgert. "Sustainable and biodegradable wood sponge piezoelectric nanogenerator for sensing and energy harvesting applications." ACS nano 14, no. 11 (2020): 14665-14674.
[4] Dreimol, Christopher H., Ronny Kürsteiner, Maximilian Ritter, Annapaola Parrilli, Jesper Edberg, Jonas Garemark, Sandro Stucki et al. "Iron–Catalyzed Laser Induced Graphitization–Multiscale Analysis of the Structural Evolution and Underlying Mechanism." Small (2024): 2405558.
[5] Dreimol, Christopher H., Huizhang Guo, Maximilian Ritter, Tobias Keplinger, Yong Ding, Roman Günther, Erik Poloni, Ingo Burgert, and Guido Panzarasa. "Sustainable wood electronics by iron catalyzed laser induced graphitization for large-scale applications." Nature communications 13, no. 1 (2022): 3680.
[6] Ritter, Maximilian, Laura Stricker, Ingo Burgert, and Guido Panzarasa. "Chemiluminescent wood." Carbohydrate Polymers 339 (2024): 122166.
[7] Ritter, Maximilian, Ingo Burgert, and Guido Panzarasa. "Shine-through luminescent wood membranes." Materials Advances 3, no. 3 (2022): 1767-1771.