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Wood Composite as an Energy Efficient Building Material:

Full paper
Guided Sunlight Transmittance and Effective Thermal
Insulation
Tian Li, Mingwei Zhu, Zhi Yang, Jianwei Song, Jiaqi Dai, Yonggang Yao, Wei Luo,
Glenn Pastel, Bao Yang, and Liangbing Hu*

Department of Energy. And windows play

Among many other requirements, energy efficient building materials require a key role in energy management within
effective daylight harvesting and thermal insulation to reduce electricity usage buildings. For the first time, we have dem-
and weatherization cost. The most commonly used daylight harvesting mate- onstrated a transparent wood composite as
the building material to efficiently harvest
rial, glass, has limited light management capability and poor thermal insula-
sunlight to provide consistent and uniform
tion. For the first time, transparent wood is introduced as a building material indoor lighting. The vertically aligned
with the following advantages compared with glass: (1) high optical transpar- transparent wood fibers in natural wood
ency over the visible wavelength range (>85%); (2) broadband optical haze exhibit an efficient visible light guiding
(>95%), which can create a uniform and consistent daylight distribution over effect with a large forward to back scat-
tering ratio. When used as window or roof,
the day without glare effect; (3) unique light guiding effect with a large forward
the transparent wood can effectively guide
to back scattering ratio of 9 for a 0.5 cm thick transparent wood; (4) excellent sunlight into the house. Unique optical
thermal insulation with a thermal conductivity around 0.32 W m−1 K−1 along the properties including an extreme optical
wood growth direction and 0.15 W m−1 K−1 in the cross plane, much lower than haze (>95%) in the broadband range and
that of glass (≈1 W m−1 K−1); (5) high impact energy absorption that eliminates a high transmittance (>85%) lead to a
the safety issues often presented by glass; and (6) simple, scalable fabrication uniform and comfortable indoor ambient
lighting without a glare effect in buildings.
with reliable performance. The demonstrated transparent wood composite
The transparent wood composite also has
exhibits great promise as a future building material, especially as a replacement much better thermal insulation than glass
of glass toward energy efficient building with sustainable materials. with at least three times lower thermal
conductivity. Greenhouse gas emission
from residential and commercial sectors
1. Broader Context can mainly be attributed to the energy use of buildings. The
application of our energy efficient transparent wood building
Energy efficient building is required to consume less energy material can yield substantial energy savings with associated
than before in indoor lighting and weatherization. Effective reductions in greenhouse gas emission. The wood based trans-
and consistent sunlight harvesting can substantially reduce parent composites can find a range of potential applications in
electrical usage while promoting natural and comfortable next-generation energy efficient buildings.
indoor lighting. Meanwhile, effective thermal insulation of
the building material could ultimately pay for itself through
cost savings in air conditioning usage. Lighting and air con- 2. Introduction
ditioning account for more than ≈50% of the total energy
used in buildings in the United States, according to the U.S. As promoted by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), energy
consumption of buildings is required to reduce 20% by 2020,
and 50% as the long-term goal.[1] Energy used for lighting and
thermal comfort contributes to more than 50% of the total
Dr. T. Li, Prof. M. Zhu, J. Song, J. Dai, Y. Yao, energy consumption in residential and commercial build-
Dr. W. Luo, G. Pastel, Prof. L. Hu ings.[2] Consequently, conserving air conditioning and lighting
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
University of Maryland College Park usage especially during daytime can yield substantial savings.
College Park, MD 20742, USA Sunlight is the best, most natural light for most daily living
E-mail: binghu@umd.edu needs. Glass is the most commonly used material for sun-
Z. Yang, Dr. W. Luo, Prof. B. Yang light harvesting. However, glass windows suffer from the fol-
Department of Mechanical Engineering lowing problems. First, glass often creates shadowing effects
University of Maryland College Park
College Park, MD 20742, USA
and discomfort glare.[3–5] To create efficient, uniform, and
consistent indoor lighting inside the building, the light har-
DOI: 10.1002/aenm.201601122 vesting window needs to yield effective directional scattering

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including (1) a high transparency over visible

Full paper

range and (2) a large scattering effect in the

forward direction. Current strategies used
to realize directional scattering often involve
complex nanostructures based on Mie scat-
tering or other resonant scattering effects
where the size of the nanostructures needs
to be finely tuned.[6] Consequently, such tech-
niques show limited capability for large-scale
commercial applications. Second, due to the
intrinsic high thermal conductivity of glass,
one-third of the energy used to heat or cool
the building is lost through inefficient glass
windows.[7] Third, glass is highly brittle and
shatters upon sudden impact, which can lead
to severe safety issues.
In contrast to glass, wood is a natural
thermal insulator with excellent mechanical
strength, which has been used as a structural Figure 1.  A house with a transparent wood rooftop can achieve a comfortable lighting condi-
material for houses and cabins for thousands tion and more constant ambient temperature. The transparent wood efficiently harvests and
guides the sunlight along the wood cell growth direction. The transmitted light is largely scat-
of years. The wood cell lumens are naturally tered in the forward direction to create a comfortable and uniform lighting. The low thermal
grown in the vertical direction for the trans- conductivity of transparent wood helps to reduce the conductive heat flow and maintain a con-
port of water and nutrients for the photo- stant temperature inside. The application of transparent wood as the light harvesting building
synthesis process,[8,9] which are composed of material not only reduces energy bill, but also promotes more comfortable living conditions.
cellulose and hemicellulose[10–13] with lignin
inside.[8] However, natural wood is not trans-
parent due to light absorbing lignin and microsized scattering are naturally aligned along the direction of growth. The aniso-
cell lumens. In this work, we demonstrate the application of the tropic, open lumens in wood blocks allow for both fast lignin
transparent wood as an energy efficient light harvesting building removal and polymer infiltration to form a transparent wood
material with the following advantages. First, our transparent composite with a well-preserved microstructure.[14] After the
wood can efficiently harvest sunlight with a broadband trans- polymer infiltration, the refractive index mismatch between wood
mittance of >85%. Thanks to the extremely high haze (≈95%) cell walls and the polymer inside the cells is greatly reduced.
of transparent wood, the indoor illumination can be kept uni- As a result, the wood composite exhibits a high transmittance.
form and consistent. Second, the transparent wood exhibits a Figure S1 (Supporting Information) shows the top view and
directional forward scattering effect, which can be used to effec- the side view of the polymer infiltrated wood cell lumens. Note
tively guide sunlight into the building. Third, wood cells present that there are many suitable choices for infiltration polymers as
large phonon resistance with multiple boundaries. The thermal long as the refractive index is close to 1.5 and the material has a
conductivity along and across the wood channels is measured to low viscosity. With the small refractive index mismatch between
be as low as 0.32 and 0.15 W m−1 K−1, respectively. When used the cellulose and the epoxy, light can propagate along the
as a transparent building material, the wood composite can growth direction while the wood cells are functioning as lossy
provide better thermal insulation than standard glass and help waveguides with a diameter ranging from tens to hundreds of
reduce air conditioning usage. Furthermore, our transparent micrometers depending on the species of natural wood. In order
wood shows high impact absorption capability. When subjected to show the light propagation in transparent wood, we have used
to a sudden impact, the microchannels with infiltrated polymer the DJ532-10 (Thorlabs Inc.), a 532 nm green single mode laser,
absorb and disperse the energy, helping keep the wood from as the incoming light source with a spot size of 200 μm. The
shattering. Figure 1 is an illustration of using transparent wood beam is incident from the right hand side with a 45° input angle
as sunlight harvesting rooftop. The transmitted light intensity and is indicated by the arrow in Figure 2a,b. A wood block with a
distribution is insensitive to the direction of the sun, keeping large thickness of 1.4 cm was used so that the propagation of the
the indoor light consistent throughout the day. The conductive beam inside the wood block can be clearly observed. As can be
heat flow can also be reduced with a more consistent indoor seen in the top view of the wood composite, Figure 2b, the beam
temperature. The transparent wood used as a window or rooftop quickly diverges after reaching the top surface of the wood and
material could ultimately pay for itself by providing cost savings then propagates along the wood channel direction. The bright
in lighting and air conditioning energy usage inside the house. laser light is well directed, indicating an efficient guiding effect.
Figure 2a is a scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image of Figure S2 (Supporting Information) shows the side view and
a natural wood block (basswood used in this work). Transparent the top view of the transparent wood block with the incoming
wood composites were fabricated by selectively removing lignin green laser beam illuminating perpendicularly, at a 45° and 70°
and subsequently filling the index matching polymer.[14–16] The angle, respectively. As shown, light confinement inside the wood
cell walls are composed of cellulose and hemicellulose with a is mainly determined by the wood channel alignment direction
refractive index around 1.5. As seen in the figure, the wood cells instead of the incident light angle.

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Figure 2.  a) An SEM image of the wood microstructure. After being made transparent, the microchannels of wood are well-preserved, which function as
microsized waveguides with high propagation loss for incoming light. b) Top view of the guided light propagation in a thick transparent wood sample.
The single mode 532 nm laser beam with a spot size of 200 μm is incident at a 45° angle to the 1.4 cm wood block. c) A 0.5 cm thick transparent
wood window exhibits high transmittance and low reflectance with effective broadband forward scattering in the visible wavelength range as well as
extremely high optical haze. This unique light management capability renders the transparent wood efficient in guiding the incoming light while at
the same time largely scattering the light in the forward direciton. d) The transmitted beam pattern of the 45° incident laser beam. The pattern of the
transmitted beam does not show any obvious divergence from a 2D Guassian distribution, owning to the combined results of the effective forward
guiding effect and high optical haze.

The densely packed and vertically aligned channels of the
transparent wood function as cylindrical broadband waveguides
with high propagation scattering losses. This unique light
management capability of the transparent wood cells results
in a macroscopic light propagation effect with a large hazi-
ness. The optical properties including haze, forward transmit-
tance, and backward reflection are carefully investigated and
summarized in Figure 2c. An integrated sphere was used to
measure the optical properties. The results show that the trans-
parent wood exhibits a high transmittance around 90% and a
simultaneously high optical haze around 95%. By taking an
averaging 90% transmittance and ≈10% reflection within the
wavelength range from 500 to 1100 nm, a directional forward
to back scattering ratio as high as 9 was obtained. For compar-
ison, nanostructures including nanocones and nanospheres are
often used in order to achieve directional scattering under the
light management schemes using Mie scattering.[6,17–19] How-
ever, the spectral response is usually sensitive to wavelength
and the forward to back scattering ratio is often smaller than
what is exhibited by transparent wood cells. While exhibiting
a high transmittance, the haze of the transparent wood can
exceed 95% which is likely due to the scattering of the vertically
propagating light by microstructural roughness. This is funda-
mentally different from the scattering of haze paper in which
fibers are mainly oriented in the planar direction and perpen-
dicular to the light propagating direction.[20,21] Furthermore,
the overall transparency for the wood composite is comparable
to standard glass, plastic, and cellulose-based nanopaper[22–24]
confirming the effectiveness of our developed procedure for
transparent wood composites. Figure 2d shows a schematic
of the single mode laser at a tilted angle incident on a trans-
parent wood sample with the transmitted light pattern captured

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on the screen. Interestingly, the beam intensity does not show Instruments-Newport was used as the white light source. The
Full paper

notable deviation from a standard Gaussian distribution. Light
management plays a crucial role[17,25–28] in the effort to improve
the overall conversion efficiency of solar cells and light emitting
diodes (LEDs). These transparent wood composites, with their
unique light management capability, can potentially serve as
effective transparent coating or substrate materials for building
integrated photovoltaic.[29,30]
Figure 3a compares the haziness of transparent wood, haze
paper, and typical soda-lime glass. Besides the high transmit-
tance, haze of the transparent wood composite reaches 95%
and is much higher than that of the ultrahigh haze nano-
paper, which exhibits a typical haze value of ≈60%.[29,31,32] In
order to demonstrate the performance of a transparent wood
window as an efficient daylight harveting building material
with high haze and high transmittance (Figure 3a), we have
built a wooden house model with a transparent wood roof
8 cm × 12 cm, as shown in Figure S3 (Supporting Information).
Sources of glare include the morning and evening positions of
the sun, ice, reflective surfaces on cars, highly polished floors,
and the windows of nearby buildings. Glare can interfere with
the clarity of a visual image. When used for daily applications,
the transparent wood is shown to provide an effective anti-
glaring effect. When looking through the transparent wood
composite, glare is completely removed while a more uni-
form brightness is obtained as demonstrated in Figure 3b. In
Figure 3c, we compare the effectivness of using soda-lime glass
and transparent wood, respectively, as a light harvesting roof
and test both designs in the model. A solar simulator from Oriel
model house is purposely made high so that the effect of wood
roof can be more pronouncedly observed. When incorporating
a light harvesting building material into the house model, uni-
form indoor illumination is observed. In comparison to a glass
rooftop, the high haze and high transparency of the wood com-
posite result in maximized sunlight harvesting of the building
and a much consistent light distribution over the course of the
day. A calibrated Si detector from Thorlabs was used to eval-
uate the light distribution inside the house model. Six different
spots were selected and marked as 1–6 for the glass top house
and the transparent wood top house, respectively. The results
are shown in Figure 3d. The maximum light intensity inside
the glass roof house is 12.3 mW cm−2 while the minimum light
intensity is only 0.35 mW cm−2, making the illumination non-
uniformity more than 35 times. On the contrary, for the house
with our transparent wood rooftop, the light intensity differ-
ence between brightest corner (4.9 mW cm−2) over the darkest
corner (2.1 mW cm−2) is only 2.3 times. Thus, the transparent
wood building material is experimentally shown to be an effec-
tive solution to save indoor lighting energy and to provide uni-
form illumination with enhanced visual comfort and privacy
protection owning to its intrinsic haziness.
Besides the requirement for daylight harvesting and mechan-
ical strength, transparent building materials also need to meet
the requirements for climate protection. Building materials for
providing enhanced thermal insulation is therefore highly desir-
able.[33] Effective insulation retards the flow of heat through the
building shell and provides a structural barrier between the

Figure 3.  a) Graph of transmittance percentage versus haze percentage of standard glass, transparent paper, and transparent wood. The haze of trans-
parent wood is the highest around 95%. Haze paper generally exhbits a haze around 60%.[29,31,32] Glass exhibits limited light management capability
with the lowest value of haze. b) Photographic evidence of the problematic glaring effect with glass in comparison to the uniform and comfortable
lighting through transparent wood. c) Photographic evidence of the uniform light distribution inside the house model when using the transparent
wood as daylight haversting rooftop in comparison of using glass. d) Compared with glass, the transparent wood rooftop house shows a much more
uniform light distribution.

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glass (Fisher Scientific Microscopic Glass)

Full paper
has a much higher thermal conductivity
measured to be ≈1.0 W m−1 K−1 (Figure 4b),
proving the transparent wood more effective
in reducing conductive heat flow.
Besides its extreme light management
capability, the mechanical properties of the
transparent wood composite also need to be
investigated. Glass has presented significant
safety concerns when used as a building
block for residential and commercial struc-
tures. When it undergoes a sudden impact
Figure 4.  a) An illustration of the radial and axial heat transport in transparent wood. The such as flying debris, an earthquake, or even
multiple interfaces between cellulose and infiltrated polymer leads to high phonon resistance. sudden movement of the occupants, glass
b) The measured thermal conductivities of standard glass, epoxy, axial and radial direction of can break and spray shattered pieces in all
our transparent wood. The transparent wood exhibits anisotropic thermal properties due to the directions. Sometimes, glass can have sudden
naturally aligned wood microstrucutre.
and spontaneous failure caused by edge or
surface damage which propagates through
house and outside environment. If well insulated, the house creep loads. The breaking of glass requires immediate mainte-
stays warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. The walls nance and attention, since the shattered glass presents severe
of most residential and commercial buildings are generally well safety issues. On the other hand, wood can withstand higher
insulated with materials such as wood and composite foam.[33] impact owning to the Van der Waals interactions between the
However, transparent building materials such as glass have a cellulose and the energy absorbing polymer infiltrated micro-
much higher thermal conductivity which results in higher heat structure. Figure 5a shows the resulting morphology of glass
flow than the surrounding materials and an overall reduction and transparent wood after fracture due to a sudden hit from
in thermal insulation of the building. Thermal insulation from a dropping sharp object. The glass shattered immediately into
windows is particularly important[34] since thermal bridging pointy pieces while our shock-resistant transparent wood stays
across transparent windows and roofs that
are made of glass can reduce energy effi-
ciency and allow condensation. Current strat-
egies to reduce heat loss through windows
such as multiple layer glazing are often costly
and can add significant weight. On the other
hand, wood is a natural insulator with air
pockets in the cell structure.[35,36] As shown
in Figure 4a, the transparent wood composite
provides a high resistance to phonon trave-
ling in the wood fiber microstructure. The
radial heat travelling pathway yields an even
larger phonon scattering effect than that in
the axial direction. The anisotropic thermal
properties of the transparent wood can be
attributed to the alignment of wood cells,
which has been well-preserved after lignin
removal and polymer infiltration. As can be
seen in Figure 4b, we measured a thermal
conductivity of around 0.32 W m−1 K−1 in
the axial direction and 0.15 W m−1 K−1 in the
radial direction, comparable to the thermal
conductivity of original basswood.[35] Inter-
estingly, a bulk polymer block (the same
polymer that has been infiltrated into wood)
shows a higher thermal conductivity of Figure 5.  a) The impact test of a piece of standard glass and a transparent wood composite of
around 0.53 W m−1 K−1. The resulting lower similar thickness. The glass shatters upon the sudden impact (upper photo) while the trans-
thermal conductivity of transparent wood parent wood only shows a dent on the surface (lower photo). b) The strain–stress curve of
transparent wood compared with glass. Glass is highly brittle exhbiting a linear strain–stress
is likely due to the high phonon resistance
relation while transparent wood composite is ductile, reaching a strain level two orders higher
across the wood cell walls (mainly cellulose than that of glass before breaking (Table S1, Supporting Information). c) Photographic evi-
and hemicellulose) and the multiple inter- dence that the transparent wood sample is water-resistant. Samples exhibit no obvious change
faces phonon scattering effect. In contrast, after 72 h immersion in water.

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intact, which is highly desirable as a safe, hassle-free, and anti-
Full paper
shatter, transparent building material. Glass is fairly rigid, but
can be brittle as well.[37] When glass is under a load it can only
accommodate stress to a relatively low level and then suddenly
fails. The failure can be sudden and spectacular. Once a crack
starts there is little within its structure to stop it from propa-
gating. Consequently, glass exhibits a linear curve in strain and
stress curve[38] as shown in Figure 5b. In contrast, the trans-
parent wood possesses a much higher strain of 6%, more than
two orders higher than that of standard soda-lime glass.[38]
This substantial increase in ductility is highly desirable for the
application as a structural material. Even after breaking upon
a sudden impact, the transparent wood is only bent and split
instead of shattering into multiple sharp pieces. For commer-
cial application as a building material, the transparent wood
is also required to be water-resistant. We have immersed the
transparent wood sample in water as shown in Figure 4c.
After 72 h, the sample is intact without any shape distortion
or any degradation in mechanical and optical properties. The
SEM observation of the epoxy filled wood walls (Figure S4,
Supporting Information) and the mechanical properties of the
transparent wood (Figure S5, Supporting Information) after
72 h water immersion have also been carried out. The results
show that water has negligible effect on the properties of the
transparent wood potentially due to the encapsulation of the
polymer component.
3. Conclusion
In this work, we demonstrate the application of transparent
wood as an energy efficient building material. We show that
the transparent wood exhibits a high transmittance comparable
to glass and a unique directional forward scattering effect with
an extremely high haze around 95%. The transparent wood can
thus be used to reduce the daytime lighting energy usage by
efficiently guiding the sunlight into the house while providing
uniform and consistent illumination throughout the day. Our
transparent wood also has a much lower thermal conductivity
compared with glass, making it a better thermally insulating
building material with a lower carbon footprint. In addition, the
polymer infiltrated wood microstructure exhibits high impact
absorption capability with a high ductility, therefore eliminating
the safety issues often presented by glass. The transparent
wood block can potentially be fabricated as a simple and scal-
able process, rendering it a promising candidate to improve
energy management in buildings.
4. Experimental Section
Materials and Chemicals: In this work, basswood was used for the
fabrication of transparent wood. The chemicals for selectively removing
lignin were NaOH and Na2SO3 (Sigma-Aldrich). The infiltrated polymer
is AeroMarine Epoxy #300/21 with low viscosity and negligible shrinkage
after curing.
Transparent Wood Fabrication: The lignin of wood was selectively
removed by immersing the wood into a solution of diluted boiling
NaOH (2.5 mol L−1, in DI water) and Na2SO3 (0.4 mol L−1, in DI water)
for 3 h, followed by immersion in boiling H2O2 (2.5 mol L−1, in DI water)
solution for 2–3 h until the yellow color of the wood was completely
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gone. The resulting white wood was subsequently immersed in the
as-prepared liquid epoxy resin for thorough infiltration. The transparent
wood composite was obtained after a complete solidification of epoxy.
Optical Property Characterization: A UV–vis Spectrometer Lambda 35
(PerkinElmer, USA) with an integrated sphere was used to measure the
optical properties including haze, forward transmittance, and backward
reflection. A 532 nm (green) single mode laser DJ532-10 (Thorlabs
Inc.) was used as the incoming light source with a spot size of around
200 μm. The beam was collimated first before varying the angle incident
on the transparent wood block. The transparent wood has a dimension of
width × height × length = 1.4 cm × 3.0 cm × 3.5 cm. The 2D light intensity
distribution of the transmitted light after the transparent wood block was
characterized with a calibrated Si detector S-130C from Thorlabs. The light
guiding effect of the house model with a transparent wood rooftop was
tested under the solar simulator from Newport. A Xenon lamp was used
as the white light source with an illumination area of 6 cm in diameter.
Thermal Conductivity Characterization: In order to evaluate the thermal
conductivity of transparent wood composite, a steady-state method was
applied. The transparent samples were cut to a strip dimension with
6 mm width and 30 mm length. A heat sink and an electric heater were
attached to opposite ends of the wood-epoxy samples and two fine-gage,
K-type thermocouples were placed at a distance of L, to measure the
temperature difference ΔT along the heat flow direction. To minimize
convective heat loss, the samples were placed in a vacuum chamber
with a heat shield. A LabVIEW program from National Instrument was
employed to monitor and record data of the sample temperature and
electrical power of heater. Once a steady-state is reached, the thermal
conductivity of the sample can be determined by applying Fourier’s
QL
Law: k = s where Qs is the heat flowing through the samples, L is
A∆T
the distance between two thermocouples, A is the cross-section area of
the sample through which the power flows, and ΔT is the temperature
difference measured by thermocouples. In the ideal case, all the power
supplied to the heater flows through the sample and into the heat
sink, so that there is no heat loss through other means, therefore the
heat flowing across any cross section is constant. However, in real
measurements, heat loss is inevitable through radiation, convection,
and heat conduction of electric wires, so the power flowing through the
sample Qs can be written as: Qs = Qinput − Qloss, where Qloss is the power
lost by radiation, heat conduction through the connection leads, and
convection. The uncertainty of the thermal conductivity measurement
along the film samples is predicted to be about 10%.
Mechanical Property Characterization: The transparent wood
composite was sectioned into test samples about 5 cm long, 1 cm wide,
and 3 mm thick for mechanical tests. A Tinius Olsen H5KT tester was
used to carry out the stress–strain measurements for the samples.
Supporting Information
Supporting Information is available from the Wiley Online Library or
from the author.
Acknowledgements
T.L. and M.Z. contributed equally to this work. The authors acknowledge
the support of the Maryland NanoCenter, including the AIMLab and the
Fablab.
Received: May 28, 2016
Revised: July 6, 2016
Published online: August 11, 2016
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