Advances in Materials Science of Wood

Volume is indexed by Thomson Reuters BCI (WoS).
Wood, which always looks quite solid to the naked eye, actually possesses a very intricate and exquisite structure; developed by Nature primarily to fulfil the requirements of a growing tree. How well the structure satisfies the needs of a construction material as used by humans is quite another matter - so to speak. Besides being an important constructional material, wood is today also an important source of precursors for the medical and chemical compounds used by human beings. These, and many other aspects of wood, are topics which materials science attempts to elucidate. When wood is used as a constructional material, human interest normally focuses on xylem, the "woody" inner portion of the trunk of a tree. The outer sections of the tree, the bark and cambium, mainly interest humans for reasons other than constructional.
As wood is an organic polymer-matrix composite, the study of wood might be assumed to be the province mainly of polymer scientists. This is not true however: materials scientists working on polymers are almost absent from research into wood. The situation is actually quite odd; since wood offers plenty of ideas which would also be applicable to synthetic polymers and their composites. This situation is reflected by the contents of this publication.