Highly Elastic Hydrated Cellulosic Materials with Durable Compressibility and Tunable Conductivity

Anisotropic cellular materials with direction-dependent structure and durable mechanical properties enable various applications (e.g., nanofluidics, biomedical devices, tissue engineering, and water purification), but their widespread use is often hindered by complex and scale-limited fabrication and unsatisfactory mechanical performance. Here, inspired by the anisotropic and hierarchical material structure of tendons, we demonstrate a facile, scalable top-down approach for fabricating a highly elastic, ionically conductive, anisotropic cellulosic material (named elastic wood) directly from natural wood via chemical treatment. The resulting elastic wood demonstrates good elasticity and durable compressibility, showing no sign of fatigue after 10 000 compression cycles. The chemical treatment not only softens the wood cell walls by partially removing lignin and hemicellulose but introduces an interconnected cellulose fibril network into the wood channels. Atomistic and continuum modeling further reveals that the absorbed water can freely and reversibly move inside the elastic wood and therefore helps the elastic wood accommodate large compressive deformation and recover to its original shape upon compression release. In addition, the elastic wood showed a high ionic conductivity of up to 0.5 mS cm^-1 at a low KCl concentration of 10^-4 M, which can be tuned by changing the compression ratio of the material. The demonstrated elastic, mechanically robust, and ionically conductive cellulosic material combining inherited anisotropic cellular structure from natural wood and a self-formed internal gel may find a variety of potential applications in ionic nanofluidics, sensors, soft robots, artificial muscle, environmental remediation, and energy storage.