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doi-10.1126/science.abg3886

Bengal scientists develop world’s hardest self-healing material [telegraphindia.com]:

The scientists used a needle to trigger mild to severe cracks in a segment of the material and watched as the cracks automatically reversed themselves within a fraction of a second after the needle pressure was withdrawn.

Self-healing materials have been under study worldwide for over three decades and have entered into engineering applications, mainly for wear-resistance in the construction, automotive and aerospace industries.

They have also entered kitchens in the form of self-healing cutting boards.

But almost all known self-healing materials are soft and amorphous — having an internal structure marked by irregularities and defects — and require some external stimulus such as heat, light or a chemical agent to heal themselves.

“Our self-healing material is 10 times harder than others,” said Chilla Malla Reddy, a chemical sciences professor at the IISER who led the research.

“And it has a crystalline structure, a well-ordered internal structure, the favoured structure in most electronics and optical applications.”

Reddy and his colleagues synthesised tiny single crystals of an organic material — each needle-shaped crystal being 1mm to 2mm long and 0.1mm to 0.2mm wide.

Original Submission