The transition from oil-based to renewable resources is of major importance, and wood has the potential to become one of the key materials of modern sustainable societies: it is an abundant and widely available renewable resource, with exceptional mechanical properties and with an essential role in carbon management (CO<sub>2</sub> storing material). Recently, a renewed interest in the utilization of wood for diverse applications has been observed, as a result of pressing concerns regarding environmental issues that an increased utilization of the resource wood may help to solve, but also associated to the development of novel modification techniques that can be used to improve wood intrinsic properties or to develop advanced lignocellulosic based materials.<br/>We will present our approaches to the design of polymer and inorganic bio-hybrid materials with unusual properties. As shown in Fig. 1A, the natural wood anisotropy may be used advantageously, to introduce new material at various locations. Using the wood surface roughness and ATRP-grafted fluorinated polymers, we developed a surface with striking superhydrophobic properties (water CA~170°, Fig. 1B). ATRP was also employed to graft poly(NIPAM) chains inside the wood cell walls, yielding a hybrid material with temperature controlled hygro-responsive behavior (Fig. 1C). New composites were also obtained via a pore-filling technique, where PNIPAM was introduced within the luminal area via a grafting-through method (Raman image, Fig. 1D). Finally, we will also show that the structural and chemical anisotropy of wood might be used to selectively alter its properties, and yield surfaces with patterned hydrophilic/hydrophobic domains after a sol-gel chemistry method is applied (pinned water drop on late wood region, Fig. 1E).<br/>We believe that these pioneering approaches to functionalize lignocellulosic materials will be of high importance in the future to promote new utilizations of the resource wood.

Functional lignocellulosic materials: Engineering smart bio-hybrids from a natural anisotropic scaffold

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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