he material can autonomously repair a 9-millimetre-wide bullet hole.
Image: Nathan Bajandas/Beckman Institute/University of Illinois
In a huge breakthrough, scientists from the U.S. have developed a chemical cocktail that allows plastic to fix itself, and could lead to all kinds of incredible applications, such as self-healing iPhone screens, tyres that fix their own punctures, and airplanes that can repair themselves mid-flight.
The development was partly influenced by animals' remarkable ability to heal ourselves - when we suffer a puncture wound, compounds flow from our blood vessels to the wound site to feed the growth of new tissue that fills the damaged area.
Materials, on the other hand, have relied on our help to fix them (or simply throw them away). Until now, that is.
Scientist and engineers from the University of Illinois have developed a two-part technique that allows plastic to heal itself without any human interaction.
First, they filled parallel channels with two mixtures of organic molecules that, when combined, form solid and semisolid structures (one red, one blue).
The scientists then put those channels into a plastic sheet and punctured holes in it. The red and blue mixtures flooded into the hole and began to combine, creating a scaffolding of cross-linked fibres.
The second step involved a third compound flowing in from the channels. This reacted with the scaffolding to fill the hole with a cloudy, purple substance - you can see the process in the image above. It also made a seal with the original clear plastic and, amazingly, restored most (but not all) of the original materials' strength.
The key to the technique is choosing chemicals that react at different rates, team member and chemist Jeffrey Moore told Science Magazine.
Previous attempts at getting plastic to self-heal have been limited to closing over microscopic-sized holes, so this is a pretty significant achievement.
If it doesn't get you excited about science, we don't know what will.
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