Self-Healing Plastic
A new polymer material that fixes its own cracks could be a step toward self-healing medical implants or self-repairing materials for use in airplanes and spacecraft. It consists of an epoxy polymer layer containing tiny catalyst particles, deposited on a substrate containing microchannels filled with a liquid.
When a crack in the polymer layer spreads to the microchannels, the liquid flows out and comes in contact with the catalyst, says Nancy Sottos, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and one of the researchers who led the work. Ten hours later, the liquid solidifies into a polymer.
Researchers have previously made self-healing plastics, but this is the first time anyone has made a material that can repair itself multiple times on its own. The material survived up to seven cracks before the catalyst stopped working.
“It’s essentially like giving life to a plastic,” says Chris Bielawski, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “This is an amazing proof of concept.”
Keep Reading
Most Popular
Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.
And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.
OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora
The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.
Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.
Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.
This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language
A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.