SCOTT: Right now, we're looking at self-healing materials and these are materials that,
when they get damaged,
they heal themselves, and they do it in an autonomic fashion
so there's no human intervention that happens automatically.
NANCY: A lot of schemes,
say for repair of materials involve
heating them or
welding them back together but that all requires that you find the crack and you
intervene. Well, our systems are really much like a passive biological system, that's just
waiting for a stimulus and can heal without you really knowing that it healed.
JEFFREY: I think the unique thing is really the idea that materials without any
electronic
external kinds of
feedback mechanisms
are are simply using environmental factors to
undergo a change and it doesn't require anything except whatever you integrated
into the materials system itself.
SCOTT: We started with microcapsules that we formulated and fabricated in the lab,
and then we integrate those into
material systems.
JEFFREY: They are solid-like, but if you
squeeze them between
two slides, then you can see that there's a reasonable quantity of liquid that is
present in that what appears to be a solid material.
If those capsules are in our composite material that's damaged by a track
the liquid contents that are in those capsules
can wick into the cracked
plain and that is what will eventually form a solid polymer that
will rebond the interfaces of that crack back together.
NANCY: They can go in ductile polymers, they can go in brittle polymers, they can go in
advanced
composite structures, adhesives, paints, so they're kind of ubiquitous.
JEFFREY: It might be a prostatic device that lasts longer and doesn't require an invasive surgery
or it may simply be that we are making in contribution to the
environment because goods are more durable.
SCOTT: I think very soon you'll see
self-healing
paints and coatings and these are coatings on metal, or something
you'd like to protect
because if you don't it's gonna rust when it's being
exposed to harsh enviornments.
And these kinds of coatings will heal themselves when they've got scratched and
damaged and then protect the substrate
in the end result is a much longer lifetime for whatever
you put the paint onto.
We've started to translate the same concepts that we looked at in terms of
structural
failure
and restoration into things like batteries that will self-heal now
by restoration of simple electrical connectivity.
NANCY: We've put things like liquid gallium or incapsulating carbon nanotubes and
nanoparticles of silver, all further conductive restoration properties and
then second, we're working on ways of shutting the battery down when it does get out of
control and it gets too hot.
JEFFREY: If a battery pack on a
vehicle gets out of control, it's going to be a pretty catastrophic event
and so trying to make sure we have
mechanisms in place to
automatically trigger the shutdown of a battery pack if it's going
into a runaway situation is really important.
NANCY: Storage becomes a
critical issue in the success of renewable resources
you've got to be able to store and deliver in a regular way so that you can run
businesses, factories,
meet all the energy demands if you want to really be effective
and that's where batteries come into play.
SCOTT: And as an engineer, I mean there's
nothing better than seeing your work
being applied and commercially relevant
to industry.
And to see the link from the basic science going all the way through the entire
spectrum to
really applied where
happening simultaneously with students side by side
is really
fundamentally exciting.
we had worked
outside of the Beckman for probably three years and had struggled mightily
to try to advances in
the whole area of self-healing.
When we moved to Beckman, it was like putting us on an accelerator,
on a roller coaster ride;
it really took off.
JEFFREY: This is an environment that
is incredibly stimulating from
always be challenged with
what are problems that
need addressing
and then finding people who are here and interested in those problems to work
alongside.
SCOTT: And without the Beckman, I don't think it would have happened.
So that's how critical, I think, it has been into my own research career
and advancing the kinds of things that we've done.