Ten years ago, combining the word "wood" with "transparency" was an oxymoron since wood, a well-known natural composite material, does not allow light to pass through: indeed, light undergoes remarkable scattering phenomena and is completely absorbed by wood. The possibility of making wood…

This study is a preliminary activity within the three-year Horizon Europe project AI-TranspWood, and proposes a novel approach for designing communication strategies to promote innovative materials in untapped markets, encouraging conversations among different stakeholders. In particular, this study…

Transparent wood-based composites, realised by removing lignin from wood, have emerged as an innovative material in the last 15 years (Mariani & Malucelli, 2022). While the scientific community has proved this material's potential, its acceptance by stakeholders is still under analysis. Typically,…

Transparent Wood (TW) is a promising composite characterized by lightweight and transparency to visible light, along with its sustainability. By using successive treatments (i.e., delignification, infiltration with suitable resins and, eventually, functionalization) TW becomes a good candidate to…

Translucent wood fiber composites offer new functions to stiff composites. Most “eco-friendly” thermoset resins are only partially biobased. Poly(limonene acrylate), PLIMA, can be fully biobased and is combined with hot-pressed softwood fibers (WF) by liquid resin impregnation and curing. Fibers are…

Bringing a radical innovation from the laboratory to society is not always a straightforward process. Beyond technical performance, innovative materials must be understood, accepted, and valued by the people who will potentially design, use, and experience them. This challenge is particularly relevant for such emerging sustainable materials as Transparent Wood (TW), a new bio-based material that combines the natural structure of wood with the optical properties of transparent materials.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad term referring to the capability of certain computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as reasoning, learning, creativity or pattern recognition. Recent progress in development of AI systems, particularly in their subset known as machine learning (ML), has been helpful in many fields of science and technology. The idea behind ML is that the computational system instead of being explicitly told what to do at each step, is trained with the available data to perform certain tasks it has been designed to.

Transparent Wood (TW) represents a fascinating development in materials science, transforming the ancient, ubiquitous natural composite that is wood into a material possessing optical clarity while retaining many of its inherent advantageous properties. Historically utilized extensively across numerous sectors from construction to art and furniture, wood is renewable and recyclable, aligning perfectly with contemporary circular economy principles. However, its natural opacity, primarily due to the presence of lignin and light scattering within its complex cellular structure, limits its application where transparency is required. The concept of transparent wood was initially explored by Fink in 1992, but it was rediscovered and rigorously investigated by independent research groups starting about a decade ago.

This Guide aims to provide people who are not familiar with Transparent Wood (TW) with an overview on this material, which was discovered in 1992 and thoroughly investigated from 2015 onwards.

Modeling of Transparent Wood - Introduction on modeling pristine selected woods at the micro-, macro-, and meso-scales