EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

Indoor lighting has a substantial influence on people’s wellbeing but are often non-sustainable, made of glass or plastics. Wood, a renewable and CO2-storing material with excellent mechanical properties, is a promising substrate for developing sustainable indoor lighting materials [1].
State-of-art reports of wood-based lighting applications make use of potentially toxic quantum dots as fluorophores or impregnate the wood structure with non-biodegradable polymers to improve the matrix transparency, compromising the sustainability [2-4].
Our approach makes use of the intrinsically hierarchical wood structure to achieve uniform illumination, maintaining sustainability and aesthetic appearance. We studied how light propagates inside wood as a function of different parameters (wood species, cut direction, lignin composition). We then impregnated wood with environmentally friendly fluorescent metal-organic complexes. In addition to their strong photoluminescence, these metal-organic fluorophores are also responsive to acidic or basic gases, allowing their use as sensors of indoor air quality.
Our concept is applicable even to large-scale applications and, thanks to the preservation of the natural wood structure, could be highly attractive for interior design (such as for lamps or luminescent partition walls).
References
[1] K. Strobel, A. Q. Nyrud, and K. Bysheim, “Interior wood use: linking user perceptions to physical properties,” Scand. J. For. Res., vol. 32, no. 8, pp. 798–806, 2017, doi: 10.1080/02827581.2017.1287299.
[2] Q. Fu et al., “Luminescent and hydrophobic wood films as optical lighting materials,” ACS Nano, vol. 14, no. 10, pp. 13775–13783, 2020, doi: 10.1021/acsnano.0c06110.
[3] K. Yu, T. Fan, S. Lou, and D. Zhang, “Biomimetic optical materials: Integration of nature’s design for manipulation of light,” Prog. Mater. Sci., vol. 58, no. 6, pp. 825–873, 2013, doi: 10.1016/j.pmatsci.2013.03.003.
[4] L. A. Berglund and I. Burgert, “Bioinspired Wood Nanotechnology for Functional Materials,” Adv. Mater., vol. 30, no. 19, pp. 1–15, 2018, doi: 10.1002/adma.201704285.