Creating a Long‐Lasting Mildew Resistance System Using Cinnamon Essential Oil‐Based Nanocapsules With Excellent Anti‐Loss Performance

ABSTRACT Plant essential oils have recently been strongly developed as environmentally friendly anti‐mildew agents, but their volatility makes their long‐term retention in the substrate a serious challenge. In this work, cinnamon essential oil (CEO) as the anti‐mildew agent was packed with melamine–urea–formaldehyde as the wall material to form nanocapsules (diameter of 50–100 nm) with excellent slow release (total release amount of only 13.45 μg/mL of CEO in nanocapsules within 336 h), followed by penetrating into masson pine wood interior by high‐pressure impregnation. Due to their small size, the nanocapsules can enter deeper, even from the cell wall pit into the cell cavity, and the good viscosity of melamine–urea–formaldehyde prepolymer can make them adhere to the cell wall of the wood, constructing a stable anti‐mold system with excellent anti‐loss performance (no obvious mildew growth on the surface of the treated wood with the concentration of only 5 mg/mL after 28 days of culture). The strategy alleviates the easy volatilization of plant essential oil and enhances the anti‐loss performance of the anti‐mold system, putting forward a new way for mildew resistance of wood.