Researchers Develop Self-Healing Plastic

schliz writes "Arizona State researchers have been working on a 'self-healing' polymer that uses a fibre optic 'nervous system' to detect and fix cracks. The system recovers up to 96 percent of an object's original strength in laboratory tests. It could find use in 'large-scale composite structures for which human intervention would be difficult,' such as wind turbines, satellites, aircraft, or the Mars Rover."

Comments

What about cars?

[ganjadude]

How many times do you drive down the road and see a cars rear or front bumper with a dent/crack, yet the rest of the car is perfectly fine?
the reason most dont fix the bumper is believe it or not a bumper cover can cost 200-500 bucks, and another 200-500 bucks to paint, and if you dont know what your doing, another 200 bucks to put back on!. I see it all the time on the roads by me, and in the cities, forget it every other car.

Re:What about cars?

[mooingyak]

One of my father's favorite stories is about a time he brought his car to a body shop to get a dent fixed. It was a dent in the trunk, roughly the size of a basketball. The guy wanted $450 to fix it (this was many years ago, so inflate to whatever sounds appropriate). He declined. When he got back home and took another look at it, he got pissed off about the whole thing and slammed his fist into the trunk... which caused most of the dent to pop back into place. What was left was closer to the size of a tennis ball. He went back to the same guy a week later and they quoted him $50 for it. He's always referred to it as his $400 punch.

Not really self healing.

[Nadaka]

It just grows stronger and returns to its original shape when cracked. A clean break would not be able to be healed. And that "repair" will fail if they ever turn off the lights in the fiber optics because the crack is still there and the strengthened plastic near the crack will cool back down.

Re:Just a thought... roadways?

[hedwards]

Probably not, at least not on the surface. The problem is that a significant portion of the wear and tear is from the surface rubbing off. It might help some, but doubtful that it would be enough to make it worthwhile.

Re:Just a thought... roadways?

[RsG]

Also, a fair bit of the issue is cost per mile.

We could build, right now, with modern technology, roads that could go decades or longer between repaving or other maintenance. No self-healing wonderplastic required; modern engineering and existing materials are up to the task. Wouldn't last forever, but if you only need to make repairs every eighty odd years, that's more than good enough. It might even been economical in the very, very long run.

The reason we don't do this is money. Simple asphalt and gravel, with sporadic repairs and repaving every decade or so is "good enough". Long term savings that would take most of a human lifespan to pay off aren't attractive to anybody in a position to implement them, for obvious reasons.