Super Wood
Our invented Super Wood, a high-performance structural material created by transforming natural wood into a much stronger and tougher material while retaining its lightweight nature (Nature, 2018). The invention uses a scalable process that partially removes lignin and then compresses the wood, causing the cellulose nanofibers to become densely packed and strongly bonded. This treatment increases the material’s strength by more than an order of magnitude compared with natural wood, making it competitive with or even superior to many engineering materials on a weight basis. Superwood also exhibits excellent toughness, impact resistance, and dimensional stability, making it suitable for demanding structural applications.
Because it is produced from renewable wood, Superwood offers a sustainable alternative to energy-intensive materials such as steel, aluminum, and concrete.
Our pioneering Super Wood fabrication strategy has also been successfully extended to bamboo and other biomaterials, demonstrating that the same densification concept—partial removal of lignin and hemicellulose followed by hot pressing—can transform fast-growing bamboo into an ultrastrong, lightweight structural material (super bamboo) .
The technology has attracted worldwide attention from both academia and industry and has led to the formation of the startup InventWood, which is commercializing the material for large-scale manufacturing. Dr. Hu is a co-founder of InventWood and continues to work closely with the company to advance the commercialization of Superwood. Through this partnership, he helps translate fundamental scientific discoveries into scalable manufacturing technologies and real-world structural materials for sustainable construction and other high-performance applications.
Hu Group’s Publications:
Super Wood
- Song, J.; Chen, C.; Zhu, S.; Zhu, M.; Dai, J.; Ray, U.; Li, Y.; Kuang, Y.; Li, Y.; Quyispe, N.; Yao, Y.; Gong, A.; Leiste, U.H.; Bruck, H.A.; Zhu, J.Y.; Vellore, A.; Martini, A.; Li, T.*; Hu, L.* A General Strategy for Processing Wood into Super Strong and Tough Structural Materials. Nature, 2018, 554, 224.
Super Bamboo
- A Strong, Tough, and Scalable Structural Material from Fast-Growing Bamboo, Li, Z., Chen, C.; Mi, R.; Gan, W.; Dai, J.; Jiao, M.; Xie, H.; Yao, Y. Xiao, S., Hu, L* Advanced Materials, 2020, 32, 1906308