Science Daily July 27, 2023 Mineral plastics are a promising class of bio-inspired materials that have properties, like self-heal ability, stretchability, hardness, and non-flammability, they can be reshaped easily. However, current mineral plastics are hardly biodegradable, and thus persistent in nature. Researchers in Germany have developed the next generation of mineral plastics, which are bio-based and biodegradable. Physically cross-linked (poly)glutamic-acid (PGlu)-based mineral plastics using various alcohol-water mixtures, metal ion ratios and molecular weights. The rheological properties were easily adjusted using these parameters. The general procedure involved addition of equimolar solution of CaCl2 to PGlu in equal volumes followed by addition […]
Tag Archives: Self-healing materials
Damage-reporting and self-healing skin-like polymeric coatings
Nanowerk August 24, 2022 As it is difficult to determine whether the currently used polymeric coatings applied to the surfaces of automobiles, ships, etc. to protect them from the external environment are already damaged or not, these non-reusable coatings must be regularly replaced, leading to a large amount of waste generation and high disposal costs. Researchers in South Korea have demonstrated mechanochromic and thermally reprocessable thermosets that can be used for autonomic damage reporting and self-healing coatings. A mechanochromic molecule, spiropyran (SP), was covalently incorporated into thermoreversible Diels–Alder (DA) cross-linking networks. Mechanical activation of SPs in DA networks was confirmed […]
Protective coating material self-heals in 30 minutes when exposed to sunlight
Phys.org August 8, 2022 Previous studies using photothermal dyes were mainly based on inorganic materials that are difficult to apply industrially as the coating material should be transparent. In addition, inorganic materials require a large amount of light energy to produce a photothermal effect. Researchers in South Korea developed a new material by adding a dynamic chemical bond that can repeat the decomposition and recombination of the polymer structure and mixed it with a transparent photothermal dye that can absorb near-infrared light which accounts for less than 10% of midday sunlight. This circumvents excessive increase of the vehicle surface temperature. […]
Strong, stretchy, self-healing polymers rapidly recover from damage
Phys.org February 28, 2022 Previously researchers in Japan synthesized multiblock copolymers that exhibited excellent elasticity and self-healing by using the two-component copolymerization of non-polar ethylene and polar methoxyaryl-substituted propylenes. Now they have developed a three-component ‘terpolymer’ of ethylene and two different methoxyaryl-functionalized propylenes using a scandium catalyst. The long, soft sections form a highly flexible matrix, within which are hard and crystalline sections that rapidly re-aggregate after the material is cut, thereby self-healing any damage within five minutes to recover 99% of its toughness and 97% of its tensile strength. The material could be stretched to almost 14 times its […]
New material offers remarkable combo of toughness and stretchiness
Science Daily February 21, 2022 Unlike hydrogel ionic liquids don’t evaporate like water, they are electrically and thermally stable and conduct electricity well, raising interesting opportunities for future applications. An international team of researchers (USA – North Carolina State University, University Nebraska, Australia) has developed a simple one step method for making ionogel. They copolymerized monomers of polyacrylic acid in a solution of ionic liquid using ultraviolet light resulting in a copolymer that incorporates both monomers and the ionic liquid itself. The resulting gel has the stretchability of polyacrylic acid, stronger than the polyacrylamide, and better than cartilage in toughness. […]
Autonomous self-healing seen in piezoelectric molecular crystals
Phys.org July 23, 2021 Self-healing polymers, gels and other materials developed so far have been soft. To develop self-healing hard materials, an international team of researchers (India, Germany) grew bipyrazole organic crystals in tiny (2mm long by 0.2mm wide) needle shapes. When pressure was applied they broke but and then bounced back from the break into straight-line needles again, verifying that the material had truly healed. It is not clear if the type of crystals produced the team will be useful in any given product. However, the work shows that piezoelectric molecular crystals can be grown in ways that allow […]