Self-Healing Coating Mimics Human Skin
8 July 2007, 10:14
Categories: biomimicry polymers
By emulating the way in which human skin mends itself when cut, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have created a polymer material that can heal itself repeatedly when it cracks. This advances the capabilities of self-healing materials as current technologies could not release a mending agent, at any given location, more than once. “It’s essentially like giving life to a plastic,” says Chris Bielawski, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The ultimate goal would be to create materials that mend themselves, he says, and “this is an amazing proof of concept.” The UIUC researchers created an epoxy coating with a network of tiny channels that contain a liquid agent. When cracks appear, the fluid bleeds out of the channels to fill the voids and comes into contact with catalyst particles within the epoxy. The liquid and the particles react to form a polymer, filling in the cracks. Their work could pave the way toward plastic coatings that can regenerate themselves multiple times.
This approach to self-healing systems is similar that proposed by University of Bristol researchers in their “Self-healing composite sandwich structures” paper. As impact damage to the skin of a sandwich panel can cause a significant reduction in its strength, they have designed a vascular network of tubes within the panels, which would release a pre-mixed resin to mend the damaged area. The impact causes the infiltration of the epoxy.
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