Development of impact-resistant mycelium-based composites (MBCs) with agricultural waste straws

This paper was intended to investigate the feasibility of developing impact-resistant mycelium-based composites (MBCs) with agricultural waste straws. Different agricultural waste straws, i.e., rice straw, wheat straw and corn straw, were applied to prepare MBCs with the inoculation of Ganoderma lucidum. The basic physical properties of MBC specimens, i.e., density, elasticity modulus and thermal conductivity, were tested and analyzed. The repeated compressive tests, as well as impact tests of MBCs under different heights, were also conducted. It was found that the thermal conductivities of all MBCs are comparable with the commercial thermal insulation material, indicating that the proposed MBCs have favorable thermal degradation and fire resistance properties. It was also found that the maximum compressive strength for rice straw and wheat straw-based MBCs can be higher than 6.4 MPa. The energy dissipation coefficient of rice straw-based MBC specimen can be higher than 90% under different impact heights, indicating that the rice straw-based MBC specimen is suitable to be applied as the impact-resistant filling material. The influence of waste straw types was also investigated and analyzed. It was concluded that the rice straw and wheat straw-based MBCs have higher compressive strength and impact-resistance than corn straw-based MBCs, which was attributed to the low degree of fermentation due to the flaky shape of corn straws.