Recently, an improved wood technology was developed by a team from NEFU led by Professor Xie Yanjun and was officially industrialized in Hebei Youlin Technology Co., Ltd.. The company has focused on this technology and built a modified wood industry base with an annual output of 200,000 cubic meters. The construction scale and production capacity is second to none in the industry.

The technical improvement of the function of the wood was developed by Professor Xie Yanjun’s team from the College of Materials Science and Engineering (Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Biomaterial Science and Technology). After more than 10 years of repeated process optimization, performance evaluation, and a scale trial production, the technology has been officially industrialized with the help of the Institute of Science and Technology and the functional departments of the College of Materials Science and Engineering. The industrialization of this technology will greatly improve the use of tree plantations in China, promote wood industrial upgrading, and protect the existing forest resources.

With the implementation of the natural forest logging ban and the sharp drop of high-quality timber import channels, planted fast-growing forests have gradually become the main raw material of China’s timber industry. China’s planted fast-growing forest area ranks first in the world. The planted forest wood has large volume and grows fast, but they also have many problems such as soft materials, large material differences, low strength, easy cracking, mold, rotting, and other material problems, making it difficult to meet the needs of high-quality wooden household products.

To solve these problems, Professor Xie Yanjun’s research team has successfully developed and built an environmentally friendly wood function improvement technology system under the guidance of Academician Li Jian, Professor Wang Qingwen and some other scientists after more than 10 years of in-depth research and repeated verification. Through the modification of cell wall macromolecules and the regulation of the wall structure, this technology takes woody cell walls as the object of study, and finally achieves a comprehensive upgrade of the physical material, cell wall and performance. It also solves the formaldehyde release and irritating gas evaporation problems of the traditional wood modification technologies (such as low molecular weight urea resin, phenolic resin, acetic anhydride, etc.), achieves the permanent fixation of the environmental modifier in wood, and avoids some quality problems such as the cracking of modified wood in the process of drying.

Through the improvement of this technology, the density and hardness of the original soft wood can be greatly improved, and also qualified with some other key performance like dimensional stability and decay resistance. This technology also has new features such as being safe and environmentally friendly, a simple process, energy efficient, etc.. You can control the surface color and texture of the wood, and the wood surface is self-cleaning, which enhances the quality of wood from the beginning. A series of the achievements of the technology have received 2013 Science and Technology Progress Award of Heilongjiang Province, and have been broadcasted by CCTV news, Live New Room and some other media.