Since wood is typically a porous material the idea of impregnating wood with polymer has been an are of great interest

The cellular structure of wood has a honeycombed type morphology, albeit not this neat but you get the idea.

The idea being to inject the wood matrix with polymer precursor either monomeric or oligomeric.
 
 

and then curing the material free-radically to form a polymer network inundated amongst the plant tissue.

     The hope being that a variety of properties will be effected, such as the water and chemical resistance, decay resistance, and of course improvement of structural properties.

    It has been shown in many cases with a variety of woods, polymer precursors, and curing methods that this sort of treatment does indeed work!!! To see more click here.
 
 
 

    However it has also been shown that simply inundating the wood tissue with polymer is not the route to materials with synergistic properties (properties exceeding that of either component) with respect to specific properties.

    What is meant by specific properties is the structural properties normalized by the density.  It has been shown in other studies that a route to achieving good synergistic properties involves not just the uptake of a monomeric species into the wood but specifically into the cell walls.    This is performed by picking a monomeric material that is more compatible with the makeup of the cell walls.  Since the cell wall is made up primarily of cellulose it is easy to see that a more hydrophillic type material would interact more specifically with the cell wall.  To learn more of this technique click here.

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