Ultrahigh content cellulose reinforced sustainable structural materials enabled by a nacre-inspired strategy

Sustainable structure materials with excellent strength and toughness have received extensive attentions. However, the great challenge of incorporating high content cellulose into polymeric matrix still remain. In this study, sustainable structural material with an ultrahigh cellulose content of 96.1 wt percent was achieved for the first time through a nacre-inspired mesoscale assembly strategy. Densified TEMPO-oxidized wood (TW) was used as building blocks to prepare TEMPO-oxidated wood reinforced polymer (TWRP) by coating with epoxy resin and cross-laminating. The resulting TWRP with biomimetic “brick-and-mortar” structure exhibited excellent strength of 137 MPa and high toughness of 1.79 MJ m −3 compared with 7.29 MPa and 0.04 MJ m −3 for natural wood, respectively. Meanwhile, the TWRP possessed a low anisotropic factor of 1.07. Moreover, TWRP demonstrated low environmental impact, low cost, low energy consumption, and easy to be expanded from the lab-scale research to the large-scale application, potentially being a low-cost, high-performance, sustainable structural material.