Scientists Create the World’s Toughest Self Healing Material | Dots | News

A hard, transparent material that self-heals when cracked. Scientists have been working for decades to create materials that can heal themselves, with some success. However, one disadvantage of those projects is that they are soft and opaque, making them unsuitable for rugged applications. As a result, the researchers decided to concentrate their efforts on creating something tougher than conventional self-healing materials. According to the experimental results published in the journal Science, the researchers used a piezoelectric organic material, which converts mechanical energy to electrical energy and vice versa, to create needle-shaped crystals that are no more than 2 mm long or 0.2 mm wide. A strong attractive force developed between the two surfaces due to the molecular arrangement in the specially designed crystals. When a fracture occurs, the attractive forces reconnect the pieces without the need for an external stimulus such as heat or others that most self-healing materials would require.