Video: Self-Healing Polymer Fixes Itself Under Ultraviolet Light
Self-Healing Materials Materials like self-healing paint and self-healing polymers could soon make a range of goods more resilient, and in some cases safer. Jeffrey Simms Photography via Flickr Self-healing materials are a thing of the future, but certainly not a distant future. For instance, NASA plans to wrap airliners in a self-healing skin within the next 20 years, and things like flexible, self-healing concrete have already been demonstrated, albeit only in the lab. Now researchers at Case Western Reserve University, along with partners in the U.S. and Switzerland, have demonstrated self-healing polymers that rejuvenate themselves after just a minute under UV light. The key was finding polymers that are really small that can be coaxed into pretending like they're really big through molecular interactions. Assembled under a mechanism known as supramolecular assembly, these self-healing polymers are composed of small molecules assembled into long, polymer-like chains using metal ions as a kind of...