Self-Healing Polymers

Between 1970 and present, global production of plastic has grown tenfold, faster than any other mass-produced material. This revolution has been fuelled by mankind’s demand for cheap, lightweight and strong materials used in industry, transportation, science, and consumer products. Plastics are ubiquitous in our everyday lives, from simple things like food packaging to items that often go unnoticed, but serve critical functions. With an emerging understanding of how plastic waste affects the environment, and few methods for reliably recycling the hundreds of millions of tons of plastic created every year, efforts to increase the lifespan of plastics are quickly growing. A new class of polymeric materials that has self-healing abilities may breathe new life into old plastics, helping improve the durability of plastic components in many applications. These self-healing polymers are able to repair damage without human intervention and could be used in complex systems where maintenance is expensive or even impossible. As the technology advances, self-healing polymers could eventually become nearly as widespread as regular plastics, and open new possibilities in fields such as biomedical devices, space exploration, and electronics.
Transcript:
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Music by Emile van Krieken:
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Song: Wings (Aether 2)
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[@zenasm.savage1999]

Ideally, you'd want some kind of multiphase polymer that had the desired healing reagent's in a colloidial suspension within the polymer itself. The activation energy of the healing reaction should be as low as possible so that the reaction spontanous completes and/or reverses at service temperature of the polymer. In this situation the reagents would need to be a catalyst so that the healing ability did not diminish over time-- in other words the healing reaction takes place constantianly through out the solution and then the reagent catalyst is somehow transported or able to diffuse to another site requiring repair within the polymer. Basically the lowest we can make the activation today is the energy required to break a microcapsule and even then its not reversible in a controlled manner.

[@justanotherguy3018]

Seems like with both intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms the healing is still quite slow compared to the possible speed of the defect propagation, how would we go about making it heal faster especially for the instrinsic mechanisms? These might be effective against fatigue but definitely wouldn't do too well against a catastrophic failure.

[@iammatty777169]

This video is brilliant, thanks for posting this. But, there’s no ISS or outer space as we have been brainwashed into believing. However, we can always use high tech polymers on the flat earth. ✌🏽 Sigma

[@JoachimJacob]

Healing is a specific biological process. I'd rather refer to the process where plastics repair themselves as repairing, restoring, or renovate, no?

[@robertverdi3077]

The vascular healing method was actually inspired by biological healing mechanisms, for what that's worth.