In May, WWSC KTH hosted visits from the board of KAW, the management of EPFL in Switzerland, and a delegation from the French embassy. The visitors got to see presentations of WWSC and lab demos of some of our activities, which spurred a lot of interesting discussions.
During the WWSC Summer workshop the graduation ceremony for celebrating the recent batch of WWSC Academy PhD students took place. At the graduation ceremony, the 43 students were highlighted and received their diploma.
Professor Lars Berglund has been honored with the prestigious Anselme Payen Award. The award, presented annually by the American Chemical Society: Cellulose and Renewable Materials (CELL) Division, acknowledges exceptional professional contributions to the science and chemical technology of cellulose and related products.
WWSC researchers at Linköping University and KTH have developed the world’s first wood-based transistor. This transistor is a major breakthrough in eco-friendly electronics, and paves the way for further development of wood-based electronics.
WWSC researcher Yuanyuan Li has been awarded the 2023 Gunnar Sundblad Foundation’s Competence Development Award of SEK 700,000 for the development of a new cellulose pulp called Aero-pulp. This new material combines regular paper pulp with nanocellulose, resulting in a material with strong water adsorption and insulation capabilities.
Delignified wood for strength, citrus-based limonene acrylate for achieving the transparency, and coconut-based laurylalcohol for enabling the storage and release of energy – that’s the recipe for the next generation transparent wood that can act as a biobased thermal battery.
WWSC-researchers at Chalmers have developed a cellulose nanocrystals-based technology that removes up to 80% of dye pollutants from wastewater. The material is sustainable, biodegradable, and offers a promising alternative to conventional adsorbents.
The beamline ForMAX at MAX IV hosts its first industry experiment: a ground-breaking study on fibre-based sustainable food packaging performed by Tetra Pak and researchers at Chalmers University of Technology and the research centres Wallenberg Wood Science Center and FibRE.
By imitating the way fungi decompose wood, WWSC researchers at KTH have been able to make a new type of material in an energy-efficient process. The enzyme-based process both consumed less energy and gave a stronger resulting material, compared to similar chemical methods, the researchers reported.
Material researchers Magnus Jonsson and Klas Tybrandt WWSC members at Linköping University, have received the European Research Council Consolidation grants.
There is interest in using lignin for material applications due to its aromatic structures, and it is foreseen to substitute fossil-based aromatic precursors, but one big challenge is that the available technical lignins are heterogeneous and still poorly characterized. This is something that the new WWSC spin-off company Proligreen, founded by Prof. Martin Lawoko and his PhD student Maria Karlsson wants to change.
Mika Sipponen, Stockholm University, is awarded with the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant for his research on using lignin as building block for recyclable materials.
WWSC is a joint research center between KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Chalmers University of Technology and Linköping University. The base is a donation from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. The Swedish industry is supporting WWSC via the platform Treesearch.
