Polymeric material may lead to self-healing smartphones
SAN FRANCISCO: Taking a cue from the Marvel Universe, researchers report that they have developed a self-healing polymeric material with an eye toward electronics and soft robotics that can repair themselves.
The material is stretchable and transparent, conducts ions to generate current and could one day help your broken smartphone go back together again.
“When I was young, my idol was Wolverine from the X-Men,” Chao Wang said. “He could save the world, but only because he could heal himself. A self-healing material, when carved into two parts, can go back together like nothing has happened, just like our human skin. I’ve been researching making a self-healing lithium ion battery, so when you drop your cell phone, it could fix itself and last much longer.”
The key to self-repair is in the chemical bonding. Two types of bonds exist in materials, Wang explained. There are covalent bonds, which are strong and don’t readily reform once broken; and non-covalent bonds, which are weaker and more dynamic. For example, the hydrogen bonds that connect water molecules to one another are non-covalent, breaking and reforming constantly
A self-healing material, when carved into two parts, can go back together like nothing has happened, just like our human skin. I’ve been researching making a self-healing lithium ion battery, so when you drop your cell phone, it could fix itself and last much longer. — Chao Wang, researcher
to give rise to the fluid properties of water. “Most self-healing polymers form hydrogen bonds or metal-ligand coordination, but these aren’t suitable for ionic conductors,” Wang explained.
His team at the University of California, Riverside, turned instead to a different type of noncovalent bond called an ion-dipole interaction, a force between charged ions and polar molecules. “Iondipole interactions have never been used for designing a self-healing polymer, but it turns out that they’re particularly suitable for ionic conductors,” Wang said. The key design idea in the development of the material was to use a polar, stretchable polymer, plus a mobile, ionic salt.
For the next step, the researchers are working on altering the polymer to improve the material’s properties.
The researchers presented their work at the 253rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS). — Newswise