Ziyuan Cheng, Yin Zhang, Xiaojian Zhou, Hao Gu, Bohao Chang, Shuaiqi Wang, Yujie Ma, Mingzhu Pan
The increasing demands for sustainable catalysis and carbon neutrality are driving the need for the development of green, scalable, and multifunctional reaction platforms. This review establishes the conceptual framework for wood as a structurally preserved monolithic microreactor for catalysis and reaction-based processes. The relationships between wood architecture, physicochemical properties (porosity, channel size, tortuosity, thickness, tailored surface chemistry), as well as catalytic performance (mass transport efficiency, directional electron transfer, catalyst immobilization, and confinement-modulated reaction pathways) are summarized to elucidate the structure-function correlations governing reactivity and durability. This review represents the first example to systematically analyze wood as a monolithic, structurally preserved, reaction-governing scaffold for catalysis and reaction-based processes. Applications in catalytic conversion, solar steam generation, environmental energy harvesting (e.g., moisture-electric generators for wearable electronics), and gas-phase reactions demonstrate the versatility of these systems. Especially, we deeply analyze how the wood structure governs the catalytic performance in these advanced applications. Besides, we compare the cost, sustainability, and some other factors of wooden microreactors with other monolithic platforms (e.g., ceramic foams, metallic structures, polymeric scaffolds). Finally, current challenges for rational design and scalable implementation are proposed in perspective of sustainable catalysis and energy conversion.