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Journal of Wood Science

Official Journal of the Japan Wood Research Society

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Small-angle X-ray scattering study on nanostructural changes with water content in red pine, American pine, and white ash

Journal of Wood Science volume 57, pages 470–478 (2011)Cite this article

Abstract

Wood is a highly sophisticated and multihierarchical material. The nanoscale structures in natural cell walls of red pine, American pine, and white ash specimens were investigated using the small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) technique. A tangent-by-tangent method was used to analyze the SAXS data. The results demonstrate that the multihierarchical scatterers in the three specimens can be divided into two dominant components, i.e., a sharp component and a wide component. The sharp component mainly corresponds to the contribution of cellulose microfibrils, and its size is almost unaffected by the water content. However, the wide component includes voids or microcracks and cellulose microfibril aggregates; its size changes, reflecting swelling and water accumulation in the voids or microcracks. Because of the different morphological features of the cell walls, softwood (red pine and American pine) displays different tendencies from hardwood (white ash) in terms of changes in the wide component with water content: the average scatterer size of the wide component has an incremental tendency with the water content in softwood, but it has a descending tendency in hardwood. Fractal analysis further revealed that in white ash the surface of scatterers is coarser and the scatterers form more compact nanostructures than in the two pine woods. All this nanostructural information can be used to explain well the difference of swelling behaviors between the two pines and the white ash.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, PO Box 918, Bin 2-7, Beijing, 100049, P. R. China

    Weidong Cheng, Xueqing Xing, Dehong Wang, Kunhao Zhang, Quan Cai, Guang Mo, Zhongjun Chen & Zhonghua Wu

  2. Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, P. R. China

    Weidong Cheng, Xueqing Xing, Dehong Wang & Kunhao Zhang

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  1. Weidong Cheng
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  2. Xueqing Xing
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  4. Kunhao Zhang
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  6. Guang Mo
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  8. Zhonghua Wu
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Correspondence to Zhonghua Wu.

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Cheng, W., Xing, X., Wang, D. et al. Small-angle X-ray scattering study on nanostructural changes with water content in red pine, American pine, and white ash. J Wood Sci 57, 470–478 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10086-011-1202-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10086-011-1202-1

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