3D Printing wood

The common way to process wood is by a top-down approach, based on cutting down trees to be used for fabrication of wooden objects. This approach leads to enormous efforts aimed at utilizing side streams of this industry to reuse and to create sustainable wood-based products. Here we present a new bottom-up approach to fabricate 3D wooden objects by two 3D printing technologies, extrusion and binder-jet. The inks are composed of cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) and xyloglucan (XG) as water-based binders for dispersed wood flour (WF) particle.

WF are finely pulverized wood or reclaimed wood, which is considered as a low value byproduct of the wood industry, while CNCs and XG can potentially be extracted from industrial side streams. Therefore, the printing process can exploit a low-cost wood product in combination with key wood-based additives via 3D printing. We used the two printing technology, to print wood objects having a wide range of material properties, ranging from strong dense objects, to light weight cellular structures, that mimic the chemical, structural, mechanical, and thermal properties of natural timber.