Glowing wood could be the future of home lighting

In New Zealand and Switzerland, a team of researchers has used biobased films to create wood with luminescent properties that could sustainably replace conventional, energy-intensive forms of lighting.

Previous attempts to develop wood films for optical applications suffered from “poor mechanical properties, uneven lighting, a lack of water resistance, or the need for a petroleum-based polymer matrix,” according to ScienceDaily.com. However, New Zealand’s Qiliang Fu and colleagues were able to create a porous surface on balsa wood that could house quantum dots and be sealed with a hydrophobic coating, creating a bioluminescent glow under UV light.

“Different types of quantum dots could be incorporated into the wood film to create various colors of lighting products,” the researchers say.

The work was reported in a recent issue of the journal ACS Nano.