And would it be possible to melt wood into a puddle in the right conditions?
In: Chemistry
TL;DR the closest you will get to melted wood is oil and natural gas.
A few things.
Melting is temperature and pressure dependant. (Phase diagram)
I’ll talk about carbon rather than wood since wood is a bundle of many different molecules. Primarily C,H,O and N (probably in that order of abundance, maybe H first)
Carbons has the highest melting point of any element. It bonds very strongly with its self.
Most things will burn at some point. Even metal. Heat a metal high enough in the presence of oxygen and it will form a metal oxide. Every element requires different amount of energy to react with the air. Most metals actually have surfaces that are oxidized. Heat carbon in open air and it will form a carbon oxide. However, this carbon oxide is lighter than air and floats away. The metal oxide is still solid and heavy. Therefore, the oxide layer on a metal forms a sort of barrier to constant oxidation. The oxide on a carbon block could at some point float away exposing more carbon and thus you have a combustion type reaction.
You will melt a material if you introduce enough heat (energy) to overcome the bonding energy but not completely break it. If you keep adding energy you will break the bonding completely and turn it into a gas.
Metallic materials will have a high thermal conductivity and the heat will spread across the whole material rapidly. This way you can break the internal metal-metal bonds without exposing them to the air. Effectively melting it.
Diamond I believe has the best thermal conductivity but it also has super strong bonding energy. But you can melt it at high temp an pressure.
However doing this in air changes things as there is enough energy to have reactions with the air.
Wood:
I do not believe you could ever effectively melt wood. If you had the right pressure, lack of air and heat with wood you would cause reconfiguring of the molecules and develop lower energy formations, thus changing the wood into something probably like oil and natural gas.
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