This is unusual for the ionic conductor to self-heal.
Scientists have been inventing a lot of innovative thing in the last few years including robots that can feel like a human being. Now a group of scientists from Harvard has found a new material that can self-heal.
This wolverine-like material is transparent and can be used in artificial muscles too. Researchers mentioned that they are going to use it for robots so that they can self-heal. This material has been found by the groups of researchers after many years of study.
This material can also stretch and it doesn’t lose its function. This material is powered by ionic conductors. This is unusual for the ionic conductor to self-heal. This is why the researchers who discovered this material also claim that this is the first ionic material that is stretchable, self-healing, and transparent.
“Creating a material with all these properties has been a puzzle for years,” says Chao Wang, another author of the paper. “We did that and now are just beginning to explore the applications.”
In order to make this material have all of these properties, the researchers used a mechanism that is known as ion-dipole interaction. After they used this mechanism they were able to create this material that can be stretched to fifty times its normal size.
This material is able to self-heal in less than 24 hours after it suffered a cut. The material doesn’t show any signs of performance loss or any lasting damage. Unlike other materials, the self-healing process happens naturally at room temperature without any other external stimulation.
In order to test the material and see if it is as effective as they believed they put it on an artificial muscle. The test showed that the muscle can be cut and it recovered in less than 24 hours without suffering any lasting damage.
The material also performed as it did before it was cut. The researchers mentioned that the material that can self-heal is a low-cost material and it is easy to create too. They mentioned that this self-heal material can be used to build many other things including batteries and robots.
What is your opinion about this material? Do you believe that it can self-heal in 24 hours without suffering lasting damage?
Image source: Flickr
