Colorful Room-Temperature Phosphorescence Including White Afterglow from Mechanical Robust Transparent Wood for Time Delay Lighting

The preparation of mechanical robust organic room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP) materials especially with white afterglow is attractive but rarely reported. Herein, a method to produce mechanical robust colorful RTP transparent wood (PTW) by infiltrating delignified wood with poly (vinyl alcohol) solutions containing arylboronic acids with various pi conjugations is reported. The doubly rigid environment provided by the BO covalent bonds and hydrogen bonds can stabilize the triplet excitons, leading to a ultralong lifetime of up to 2.13 s and excellent RTP emission stability (without obviously quenching over a month) of the target PTW. Besides, as a promising structural material for optical applications, the PTW shows combined advantages of multicolored persistent luminescence (from blue to green and then to red), good optical transmittance (approximate to 90%), and striking mechanical strength (approximate to 154 MPa). More importantly, by introducing appropriate amount of fluorescent dye rhodamine 6 G to the PTW with blue afterglow, white afterglow with a lifetime of 1.85 s is successfully achieve through triplet-to-singlet Forster resonance energy transfer. The PTW can function as afterglow window, anticounterfeiting label, and time delay lighting. This success paves the way for the development of mechanical robust, ecofriendly, and practical RTP materials. An ingenious design strategy is developed to produce mechanical robust colorful room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP) transparent wood by infiltrating delignified wood with poly (vinyl alcohol) solutions containing arylboronic acids with various pi conjugations. The doubly rigid environment provided by the BO covalent bonds and hydrogen bonds can stabilize the triplet excitons to afford long-lived RTP and excellent emission stability.image (c) 2024 WILEY-VCH GmbH