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Fabrication And Analysis Of High-Performance Thermochemically Densified Wood, Victor Arulappan Pushparaj

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While wood construction may be as ancient as humanity itself, wood remains one of the most utilized structural materials because of it’s availability, low cost, durability, surprisingly high specific mechanical properties, and renewability. Recent research into wood-based materials has focused on strategies for enhancing the strength and stiffness of as-grown materials. We fabricated densified wood by thermochemically treating raw white oak wood in Na2SO3 and NaOH solutions, followed by compressing the treated wood at 5MPa at high temperature. Treating the raw wood in NaOH and Na2SO3 cleaves the alpha-O-4 ether bond and beta-O-4 ether bonds, thus dissolving most of the …