Team cause teacher Marek W. City provided the results of the
analysis at the National Conference & Exposition of the American Chemical
Community in San Paul this week,
disclosing a type of plastic that imitates our skin.
Though self-healing plastic
isn't a new idea, City says the benefit of his crew's plastic is its
caution program and ability to fix itself over and over again.
Different groups have contacted the idea of self-repairing plastic
in different ways, from treating materials with medications that launch mending
substances when damaged to making materials that restore themselves when
revealed to outside incitement like heat and lighting. The School of The
southeast part of Mississippi's result was a variety of both.
Urban and his group designed the plastic using small
molecular hyperlinks, or "bridges," that period the long stores of
substances that make up plastic. When the plastic is damaged or damaged, the
hyperlinks are damaged and launch a red color (akin to bleeding) to let you
know there is damage. The plastic can then fix itself with experience lighting
or a change in pH balance or temperature.
Urban recognizes this caution program as an advantage for
big-scale components like connects, planes, and even war tool systems, down to
daily items like mobile phone devices and car bumpers. (Anyone else saying
self-healing droids a la Terminator?)
A couple of other benefits to this new plastic are that it
can fix itself over and over again, and it's more eco-friendly than other
materials since it's made from water-based copolymers.
With partially analysis financing coming from the Office of
Immunity, City said the group is now looking to integrate the technology into plastic
that can hold up against high conditions. But he didn't say when we might see
it in commercial use.
