Self-healing technology is nothing new and first emerged in 2001, when researchers at the University of Illinois created a plastic capable of repairing itself when it cracked. The researchers at Bristol University have been working on developing the technology for 3 years and is being billed as an important breakthrough that could apply to all kinds of carbon fibre composite materials.<\/p>\n
Speaking exclusively to The Independent on Sunday, Professor Duncan Wass, said he expected self-healing products to reach consumers in the \u201cvery near future\u201d. The professor and his team have been working with aerospace engineers at the University who wanted to find a way of preventing the tiny undetectable cracks that form in an aircrafts wing and fuselage.<\/p>\n
The team specialise in modifying carbon fibre composite materials and came up with the idea to add tiny, hollow \u201cmicrospheres\u201d to the carbon material, so small that they look like a powder to the human eye, which break on impact, releasing a liquid healing agent. The agent seeps into the cracks left by the damage before coming into contact with a catalyst, triggering a rapid chemical reaction which causes it to harden.<\/p>\n
Professor Wass told the Independent on Sunday<\/p>\n
We took inspiration from the human body, we\u2019ve not evolved to withstand any damage, if we were like that we\u2019d have a skin as thick as a rhinoceros, but if we do get damaged, we bleed, and it scabs and heals. We just put that same sort of function into a synthetic material: let\u2019s have something that can heal itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The healing material, could take anywhere between a couple of hours and a day to recover, with warmer temperatures accelerating it and colder destinations such as a runway in Reykjavik, Iceland during winter taking longer.<\/p>\n
The technology could make airline safety checks far cheaper and easy to spot as a dye could be added to the catalyst causing any damage to an aircraft to stand out like a bruise. This would allow engineers to quickly find damaged areas when examining the plane and ensure that they don\u2019t miss anything.<\/p>\n
The research is due to be presented at a Royal Society meeting in London this week and was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council\u2019s UK Catalysis Hub, a collaborative project between universities and industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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