Self-Healing & Communicating Materials

Materials have become smarter and they will reshape the future. As the time flies, they are already transforming industry, especially the materials science field itself.

Take for example the Smart materials. Smart materials itself is a broad field finding applications in the environment, mobility, energy and health areas. These materials react to changed conditions without human intervention. And these materials can now self-heal and self-report or communicate making them the new kind of smart materials

So what can these materials do in the future?

Well do you know that one of the common problems faced by aircraft turbine engines is the attack by sand and other air borne particles due to which cracks form on their surfaces. If a self-healing material is introduced into the surface coating, this material can close the crack and heal the area. In this healing process the change in a property can be measured, which can be reported by the communicative material.

So can you imagine having a material which will report you whether it’s functional or damaged by itself? These materials may report and self-heal giving a hope to aerospace, automobile and energy industries. Hence in the future, materials and even entire machines will be able to report how they are doing.

                             

                  Image: The aggregate of this concrete contains bacterial spores that fill in any cracks in the material

Self-healing & communicative materials represent a huge hope for the machine design area. If materials can heal themselves and both the materials and entire machines can report their condition, engineers are able to finish their designs at the earliest; the components of the car/aircraft being lighter need to move less mass, which in turn will lead to significant savings, such as in fuel.

Communicative materials could reduce the customary maintenance and humans would only intervene when it actually became necessary. Like in the case of drilling machine or mobile phones where the materials will report when the components need to be serviced.

And not just these areas, these materials may focus themselves in the area of health and medicine too. Production of human organs using a 3D printing is ongoing research now. Material scientists are also working on implants designed to be inserted into the human brain where they are to measure brain waves and help quadriplegics who are unable to move their arms and legs to operate their own wheelchair. So, its aerospace, automobile, energy, environment, healthcare and cyber engineering that these materials find their future potentials.

I believe we need to discover the progress and future of these materials from our material scientists at the Smart Materials Meet 2018- Dubai. If you are one among the few interested towards such research area then join us as a delegate or deliver your ideas as a speaker at this meet on April 19-20, 2018.

Look forward to finding the future of these smart materials at the meet…