SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Taking a cue from the Marvel Universe, researchers report that they have developed a self-healing polymeric material with an eye toward electronics and soft robotics that can repair themselves. The material is stretchable and transparent, conducts ions to generate current and could one day help your broken smartphone go back together again.
[...] "When I was young, my idol was Wolverine from the X-Men," Chao Wang, Ph.D., says. "He could save the world, but only because he could heal himself. A self-healing material, when carved into two parts, can go back together like nothing has happened, just like our human skin. I've been researching making a self-healing lithium ion battery, so when you drop your cell phone, it could fix itself and last much longer."
The key to self-repair is in the chemical bonding. Two types of bonds exist in materials, Wang explains. There are covalent bonds, which are strong and don't readily reform once broken; and noncovalent bonds, which are weaker and more dynamic. For example, the hydrogen bonds that connect water molecules to one another are non-covalent, breaking and reforming constantly to give rise to the fluid properties of water. "Most self-healing polymers form hydrogen bonds or metal-ligand coordination, but these aren't suitable for ionic conductors," Wang says.
Wang's team at the University of California, Riverside, turned instead to a different type of non-covalent bond called an ion-dipole interaction, a force between charged ions and polar molecules. "Ion-dipole interactions have never been used for designing a self-healing polymer, but it turns out that they're particularly suitable for ionic conductors," Wang says. The key design idea in the development of the material was to use a polar, stretchable polymer, poly(vinylidene fluoride-co-hexafluoropropylene), plus a mobile, ionic salt. The polymer chains are linked to each other by ion-dipole interactions between the polar groups in the polymer and the ionic salt.
More information: Mechanically adaptive electronic polymers for transparent self-healing artificial muscle, the 253rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), 2017.
Related: https://phys.org/news/2016-12-wolverine-material-self-healing-transparent-highly.html
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Wednesday April 05 2017, @04:01AM (3 children)
as opposed to the self-desctuctive ones we have now?
More glass; glass to the edges; glass front *and* back; fragile (due to being engineered smaller) plugs and sockets. Everything about "modern" phones is fragile.
This leads to a booming market for spares and repairs, and improves the sales of the "next" model, owing to your old one brraking so often..
Why would manufacturers want this to stop?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @04:27AM (1 child)
The goal is to make self-healing robots that just wouldn't die when you kill it. Like a zombie, it would rise after healing itself and murder more people. I suggest giving them an acid bath, but they will start having rubber skin. Then burn them and they start having fire-resistant rubber skin. The only way to be sure would be to disassemble and destroy the individual components. But that might be a failing strategy because more robots will be manufactured than can be safely destroyed in any given time. ... and then they start making liquid metal robots which cannot be destroyed unless it is bathed in molten metal. That is where we are heading.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @05:14AM
Those rubber-sheathed robots are going to get lots of action.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by julian on Wednesday April 05 2017, @06:05AM
Here's another way to look at it.
How durable and portable was a computing and communication device equal to an iPhone 15 years ago? There's no answer, because it didn't even exist. Maybe a warehouse-sized super computer could match it in FLOPS but it needed a LOT more power and space.
My phone has more power, more memory, and better connection to the internet (without wires) than my first few computers combined and it achieves that with less power on a battery that lasts a few days.
These aren't being "designed" to be fragile. They are being designed to be as indestructible as possible while achieving the computing goals that the market demands. I don't use a case with my iPhone 6s Plus. It feels solid in my hand. It's made of some of the hardest glass ever made by man, and an aluminum alloy that wasn't even available 20 years ago.
You want to talk about planned obsolescence talk about the way it's held together: glue and unserviceable batteries running an OS that never uses less resources than the last version.