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Spacecraft, Heal Thyself
carpdeus writes "The European Space Agency, citing the fact that we don't glue ourselves together when we nick ourselves, has funded a study toward creating a spacecraft that could fix itself. By replacing a few of the fibers in the resinous material that make up a spacecraft's skin with hollow fibers containing adhesive, the material has a chance to fix itself when it encounters minor damage, much the way our skin does when blood wells up and clots. While admittedly years away, such material makes longer duration missions a possibility."
I'm not sure if they're trying to say that our bodies don't naturally glue themselves back together or that we don't apply glue to cuts, but either way, they're wrong.
You don't understand Materials Science.
The idea is to prevent small cracks from developing due to micro imperfections in the material, stresses imposed during flight, small-scale impacts, etc.
If small cracks form, they can then grow and propagate while in flight possibly leading to catastrophic failure.
The material is a composite reinforced with fiber "A" (could be carbon fibers, kevlar, whatever). It has specific strength requirements. The idea behind this technology is to fill this composite with a SMALL amount of hollow glass fibers. They would obviously design it such that the small addition of hollow glass fibers do NOT affect the overall strength of the material in a significant way. The addition of these hollow fibers however, allows for some resin to be stored and release during breakage of the fibers thus reacting chemically with the matrix to seal the crack tip and prevent propagation.
What they would need to do is make sure these hollow glass fibers are properly dispersed in the matrix.
Keep in mind that you can't just "make" the composite out of the resin that they are storing in the glass fibers. This chemical, whatever it is, would need to react with the matrix and "re-polymerize" sealing the crack tip. By itself, this chemical agent stored in the hollow glass-fibers would not be usefull at all to actually make the composite.