Lignin, cellulose and hemicelluloses have main roles on swelling and shrinkage of wood products. Interaction of these components with moisture has an important effect on market-friendly when the wood is subjected to the outside utilizations. In the heterogeneous structure of wood, sorption and desorption are occurred in different stages and it calls hysteresis. Hysteresis is a characteristic result from a moisture/temperature/time-dependent, slow, non-equilibrium, swelling-related conformational change, which is facilitated by increasing free volume and mobility in a polymer that is being plasticized during sorption that usually progresses through the stage of water clustering (Reina et al. 2001). Cell wall polymers of wood have a different behavior in the face of moisture in terms of sorption, desorption and hysteresis (Engelund et al. 2013).

In order to better comprehension of the effect of cell wall material such as lignin, cellulose and hemicelluloses, Scots pine micro-veneers were subjected to hydrolysis with sulphuric acid or delignification with acidic sodium chlorite, as previously described (Klüppel and Mai 2012). Then the hemicelluloses were isolated from the delignified veneers according to the chloride method. The commercial lignin was also used after dialysis tubing. The water adsorption and desorption mechanism of delignified and hydrolysed veneers as well as cell wall polymers such as cellulose, hemicelluloses and lignin were determined using a dynamic vapour sorption (DVS) apparatus.

The hydrolysed veneers were resulted in obviously lower moisture content in adsorption and desorption processes with increasing the relative humidity (RH) (Fig. 1a). While, delignified veneers showed slightly higher moisture content compared to control with increasing the ambient moisture until 70% RH and then considerably higher until 95% RH. Control specimens shown higher hysteresis than hydrolysed veneers and also higher hysteresis than delignified veneers after hygroscopic range (Fig. 1b). Moisture content of cell wall constituents in various relative humidity exhibited the higher moisture sorption and desorption of cellulose than lignin, however, hemicelluloses illustrated the significantly higher moisture content than other two cell wall polymers which might be attributed to the softening of hemicelluloses in higher relative humidity (Fig. 2a,b,c). Lignin showed higher hysteresis than cellulose in different relative humidity. Hemicellulose demonstrated the relatively low hysteresis until 50% RH, and with increasing the ambient pressure from 60% RH the hemicelluloses exhibited the extremely higher hysteresis than other cell wall polymers.