Scientists Create World’s First Self-Healing Plastic

Many items are easily breakable, but they may soon be able to repair themselves, thanks to a team of Spanish scientists who claim they’ve created the world’s first self-healing plastic.

Dubbed as “Terminator,” after T-1000, the liquid metal robot in the movie Terminator 2 that could repair itself, the new material was developed by researchers from the Center for Electrochemical Technologies in San Sebastian. In the Materials Horizons journal of Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry, researchers wrote that the self-healing polymer could be used to bolster the integrity and lifetime of plastic parts in common products like electrical components, cars and houses.

Test show that after one sample was cut in half, pressed together and left for two hours, the polymer achieved an impressive 97 percent healing efficiency and was unbreakable when manually stretched.

Currently, the material is extremely soft, so researchers are trying to develop a harder version for industrial applications.

Check out the video below of the polymer being sliced in half, then reattached.

Source: news.discovery.com