Efficient design, production, and optimization of new safe and sustainable by design materials for various industrial sectors is an on-going challenge for our society, poised to escalate in the future. Wood-based composite materials offer an attractive sustainable alternative to high impact…

The current challenge toward the development of more sustainable processes and the design of low environmental impact and efficient materials is having a significant impact on the academic and industrial communities. In this context, the design, implementation, and application of novel polymer-based…

Wood is a natural composite material mainly consisting of three components, i.e., cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin. It exhibits a complex hierarchical structure characterized by open channels, aligned in the growth direction, having specific porosity at micro-, meso-, and macro-scale, and an…

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) 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 replace glass and plastics in several industrial applications, such as construction, automotive, electronics and furniture. The AI-TranspWood project, funded by the European Commission, has the ambition to create an AI-driven multiscale methodology for TW composites. In this context, modelling of resin infiltration into delignified wood is an important step to understanding and optimizing the fabrication of TW products.

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