2016-Sustainable Industrial Processing Summit
SIPS 2016 Volume 7: Yang Intl. Symp. / Multiscale Material Mechanics
| Editors: | Kongoli F, Aifantis E, Wang H, Zhu T |
| Publisher: | Flogen Star OUTREACH |
| Publication Year: | 2016 |
| Pages: | 190 pages |
| ISBN: | 978-1-987820-48-5 |
| ISSN: | 2291-1227 (Metals and Materials Processing in a Clean Environment Series) |
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Rethink Wood: Its Unconventional Applications in Advanced Materials Design
Teng Li1;1UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, College Park, United States;
Type of Paper: Regular
Id Paper: 462
Topic: 1
Abstract:
There exist surging societal needs for products made from renewable and sustainable resources that are biodegradable, carbon neutral and non-petroleum based. Wood cellulose fibers, the major components of paper, are obtained from plants and represent one of the most abundant and renewable materials on earth. Wood cellulose fibers have an intrinsically hierarchical structure, which holds promises to enable an array of highly desirable properties and thus could enable unconventional applications beyond their traditional use. In this talk, I will showcase an unconventional application of wood cellulose fibers: An anomalous scaling law of strength and toughness of cellulose nanopaper. The quest for both strength and toughness is perpetual in advanced material design; unfortunately, these two mechanical properties are generally mutually exclusive. A general mechanism to address the conflict between strength and toughness still remains elusive. We report a first-of-its-kind study of the dependence of strength and toughness of cellulose nanopaper on the size of the constituent cellulose fibers. Surprisingly, we find that both the strength and toughness of cellulose nanopaper increase simultaneously (40 and 130 times, respectively) as the size of the constituent cellulose fibers decreases (from a mean diameter of 27 μm to 11 nm), revealing an anomalous but highly desirable scaling law of the mechanical properties of cellulose nanopaper: the smaller, the stronger and the tougher. The findings of this research could lead to a new class of high-performance engineering materials that are both strong and tough, a Holy Grail in materials design. To this end, we have demonstrated high-performance fibers by hybridizing wood cellulose and graphene oxide.