As a supplement to the ScienCentral News story "Self-Healing Plastic," the video at the right includes extended, technical interview clips from researchers Kathleen Toohey and Scott White. They discuss the physical make-up of the self-healing materials, the challenges faced in developing them, and what the future holds for their new microvascular technique.
What exactly are the network and the self-healing materials made of?
It's a polymer, so it's an epoxy material that we're working with, the coating is a brittle polymer, so it cracks very easily, and the part that has the microvascular network is a much more tough polymer, we're trying to prevent cracking in the network right now, so that just the coating cracks. The healing components are a fluid healing agent, which is a technically a monomer, and then a catalyst which it reacts with. But we're also working with using multiple systems, where we use two fluids instead of one. The two fluid system would be like a part A and a part B of a polymer, so these two parts mix and they solidify in the crack to heal the crack in the same way.
What were some challenging aspects to this study?
My advisors, ha ha, no. Everything was a challenge as I got started, because I had to learn a new manufacturing process. And we didn't have an idea of how this vascular concept would be proven, we didn't even know what type of specimen we were going to use. So I spent the first couple of years just developing a specimen that we could essentially demonstrate this with. And then the next couple of years I spent actually getting that specimen to heal, repeatedly. So the biggest challenges were kind of all over the board, from chemistry, to engineering and everything in between.
What is your lab working on next?
So beyond healing, the natural next steps are to look at things like cooling. The same fluid that we're circulating right now to heal the material, could be used to actually cool that material at the same time. And so now you're talking about multi-functional behavior of these material systems, by circulating certain types of fluids, and maybe even having multiple vascular networks within the same material. Perhaps one would be geared towards healing, and another one would be geared towards cooling, perhaps others would be geared towards sensing, sensing the environmental factors.
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