Wood generates power: Turn veneer into tiny electricity generator candidate

Wood is renewable and abundant, but as an electricity generator, it has always been a poor performer. Its rigid structure and low piezoelectric response have kept it out of the smart-device revolution.

A team from Nanjing Forestry University has now found a way to change that. Working with lightweight balsa veneer, they applied two green, biodegradable mixtures that act like gentle chemical tools. The first deep eutectic solvent (DES) removed about 56% of the wood’s stiff lignin while preserving its honeycomb-like porous structure. This made the veneer highly compressible and springy: it bounced back after 100 compression cycles with 82.3% shape retention. The second solvent grew zinc oxide nanoparticles directly onto the cell walls. Zinc oxide is a well-known piezoelectric material, and anchoring it inside the wood’s natural pore network created ideal charge-generating sites and built-in conductive pathways.

The modified veneer produced 0.24 V under gentle pressing, which performed 3.4 times more than untreated wood. When four pieces were stacked in series, output jumped to 0.92 V, with stable performance over repeated use.

This work turns ordinary wood into a self-powered sensor material, opening possibilities for smart flooring, touch-sensitive furniture, or wireless monitoring, which all without batteries or complex electronics. The work titled “Development of high-piezoelectricity wood veneer and its response mechanisms”, was published on Journal of Forestry Engineering (published on May 25, 2026).