New Self Healing Material Invented

The latest invention coming out of Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering sounds more like a super hero characteristic only capable in animated movies. A self healing  material has been developed thanks to extensive research and testing conducted by a team of professors, researchers and graduate students.

This is the first material ever of its kind that can sense pressure and heal itself when burned, torn or cut. In an attempt to replicate the two most important characteristics of the human skin, pressure sensitivity and an ability to self-heal, “a flexible and electrically conducting material,” has successfully been created, according to the journal, Nature Nanotechnology.

Stanford Chemical Engineering Professor Zhenan Bao says that “the researchers succeeded by combining two ingredients to get what Bao calls ‘the best of both worlds’—the self-healing ability of a plastic polymer and the conductivity of a metal,” as reported by Stanford University News.

“If you take a piece of cardboard, for example,” graduate student Benjamin Tee explains, “and you cut it into two, if you have this material, it brings the two pieces together to attach the two sides to each other without a need for glue – it does it itself, that is the magic.”

During the development process, Boa told Stanford University News, “the researchers took a thin strip of the material and cut it in half with a scalpel. After gently pressing the pieces together for a few seconds, they found the material gained back 75 percent of its original strength and electrical conductivity. The material was restored close to 100 percent in about 30 minutes.”

“Even human skin takes days to heal. So I think this is quite cool,” Tee told Stanford University News.

Tee went on to explain some of the future ways this invention might be of use to people in the next few years. For example, if this material were to cover electronic devices including phones and tablets, it would allow the exterior of these devices to be impervious to scratches or nicks of any kind. The self-healing material would heal those damages on its own.

It would only take about “several minutes,” says Tee. The material heals itself fairly quickly.

For the bigger damages that the material is unable to repair on its own, Tee says that phones could be programmed to notify the owner of a damage if they are unaware of it.

As for now, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, who assisted in the funding of this research, is hoping to put this material to good use in the field of prosthesis.

Ideally, officers would be able to quickly heal exterior damage make to their prosthetic legs or arms with the help of this new material.

Tee admits that the material cannot heal interior damage such as gunshots or extreme fire damage that might penetrate the material. “There are definitely some limits to how much the damage can be,” says Tee, but he hopes that ability might lie in the future of this product.

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com