Planes will be having self healing wings
Tiny cracks on the wings of aircraft can lead to jets being grounded at a cost of millions of pounds. But British chemists have a solution – a self-healing compound that could enable wings to heal themselves in a similar way to how human skin repairs itself.
The compound could also be used to make mobile phone screens that fix themselves and hardy nail polish where chips are automatically repaired.
The research, carried out at the University of Bristol, is said to have ‘started on the back of an envelope’ as the team looked at ways to prevent tiny cracks from forming in places such as aircraft wings.
Their solution involves adding tiny, hollow microspheres to carbon fibre composite materials.
These break on impact, releasing a liquid healing agent that seeps into the cracks left by the damage.
It then comes into contact with a catalyst which triggers a rapid chemical reaction that causes the agent to harden.
Tests revealed the material was just as strong after it had healed as it was before the damage.
It takes between a couple of hours and a day to fully harden and is faster in warmer temperatures than cooler ones.
Lead researcher Duncan Wass, a professor of catalysis, explained: ‘We took inspiration from the human body.
‘We’ve not evolved to withstand any damage – if we were like that we’d have a skin as thick as a rhinoceros – but if we do get damaged, we bleed, and it scabs and heals.
‘We just put that same sort of function into a synthetic material: let’s have something that can heal itself.’
The team has spent three years working on the technology and is planning to bring it to market ‘in the very near future,’ with interest from L’Oreal already.
Professor Wass added: ‘We’re definitely getting to the stage where in the next five or 10 years we’re going to see things like mobile phone screens that can heal themselves if they crack.’
Self-healing technology first emerged in 2001, when researchers at the University of Illinois in the US created a plastic that could repair itself and there are ongoing studies into healing concrete.
The University of Illinois team created a polymer in 2014 that they showed can fix holes of up to three centimetres.
As well as helping to save lives, self-healing technology could also make safety checks by airlines become much cheaper to carry out.
Elsewhere, using a type of bacteria typically found near active volcanoes, researchers from Delft University mixed the bio material into the concrete along with calcium lactate.
When cracks in the concrete appear, and water enters them, the water ‘awakens’ the bacteria.
Once active, the bacteria ‘eat’ the calcium lactate and secrete limestone which closes the cracks. A stock image of a pot hole is shown.
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