Archive
Tag: Wood Science
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Bark-based polyurethane foams: the hydroxyl groups are on the wrong backbone
Bark is rich in hydroxyl groups, which is exactly what a polyurethane polyol needs. The difficulty is that they sit on rigid aromatic rings, and almost every route to bark-based…
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The pine cone: a material that opens and closes without energy
A pine cone opens when dry and closes when damp, using no cells, no energy and no moving parts. How the bilayer mechanism works, why the microfibril angle explains it,…
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Molecular Velcro: how the wood cell wall yields without weakening
A tree bends far past the point where an engineering material would be permanently damaged, then stands up again. The explanation is a stick–slip mechanism inside the cell wall: weak…
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Lignin: the polymer built without a blueprint
Lignin is the second most abundant biopolymer on Earth and the matrix that allows trees to stand upright. Unusually among biological macromolecules, it is assembled without a genetic template, and…