A research group led by Akira Harada, a full-time professor at the Project Research Center for Fundamental Sciences, Graduate School of Science, Osaka University, announced that he has developed a self-healing material with a new design principle that has never been seen before.
Materials that are attracting attention in the industrial world are materials that spontaneously repair wounds even if they are damaged (self-repairing materials).In the past, many self-healing materials have been developed that utilize the property of the material itself that "it returns to its original state even if it is dented" and that incorporates a reversible bond that connects even if it breaks at the molecular level.
On the other hand, the problem that "hard objects are difficult to repair when damaged" has not been solved, and it has been desired to develop a self-repairing material with a new design principle to solve this problem.
The research group has developed a self-healing material designed based on a polymer with a special structure called polyrotaxane and introducing a reversible bond that connects even if it breaks between them.With this material, the repair rate recovers to 10% or more of the original within 80 minutes even if it is cut and re-contacted in the solvent-containing state, and in the solvent-free film state, there are 30 scratches on the surface. It was revealed that it shows extremely fast and highly efficient self-healing property that it recovers to almost 100% within minutes.
This material brings new possibilities to the design guidelines for self-healing materials, and is expected to be applied to a wide range of fields from chemical products such as coatings to medical materials.
