Design and Construction of Highly Luminescent Transparent Woody Materials Exhibiting Unique Fluorescence-Enhanced Staining Effects for Visualization of Intrinsic Microporous Networks

Luminescent wood materials are an emerging class of biomass hybrid host materials owing to the hierarchical porous structure and functionalization versatility. The fluorescence properties are largely dependent on exogenous fluorophores, which are, however, often plagued by notorious aggregation effects. In this work, an efficient strategy for the preparation of luminescent transparent wood materials is developed by incorporating tetraphenylethylene-derived aggregation-induced emission (AIE)-active fluorophores during a delignification-backfill transparency process. These wood hybrids showed unexpected luminescence enhancement that significantly increased the fluorescence quantum yield of the fluorophores up to 99%, much higher than that of the fluorophores in other states such as crystalline solids or doped in a polymer substrate. Mechanistic investigations reveal that