Researchers Develop ‘Self-Healing’ Plastic

Researchers Develop ‘Self-Healing’ Plastic Texas A&M has laid the groundwork for automotive plastics that allow dents and scratches to be removed with a hair dryer. The same technology will likely find a market even sooner in the aerospace and defense industries. “One of the main challenges with composite materials is repair,” says Mohammad Naraghi of the Nanostructured Materials Lab at Texas A&M. “Some damage can be well inside the material, where it can’t be seen, but can manifest itself through catastrophic failure.” Naraghi heads a research team that includes researchers from the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. They designed a self-healing carbon-fiber plastic composite. The plastics, called vitrimers, are reinforced with discontinuous fibers. They recover their original shape under heat treatments and outperform steel in strength.  “With a good, high-end microscope, you can look at a structure and see internal cracks that could be super small, tinier than the thickness of a human hair, nanoparticle size,” says Naraghi. “Those cracks can come together to form larger defects. Our material restores them, due in part to the material, but also due to a chemical reaction in the material.” The material is a reality, according to Naraghi. The carbon-fiber plastic composite is called Aromatic Thermosetting Copolyester (ATSP). “We’ve been working on it for about 5 years,” he says. “Now we’re looking for applications.” As ATSP matures and scales up in production, Naraghi suggests it has the potential to transform commercial and consumer industries. An added benefit of self-healing is recyclability. ATSP can be melted and reused without loss of function. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Mohammad Naraghi, Texas A&M, 701 H.R. Bright Building, College Station, Texas 77843 (ph 979-845-7541; Naraghi@tamu.edu).

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