Self-Healing For Long Life Beats the Circular Economy

Attention is turning from making recycling more efficient to avoiding it in the first place. Industrialized nations lose approximately 3% of their gross domestic product GDP due to premature materials degradation (NACE Rep. (2002) and others later). Longer life is increasingly demanded because:

Long life beats repair, recycling and replacement in conserving scarce materials and minimising emissions. Total cost of ownership is increasingly prioritised. Reliability is worth the price. Indeed, in military, security and healthcare applications it can be paramount.

We seek to repair people in a more sophisticated, effective and enduring manner, increasing both quality of life and longevity.

Many new solutions are becoming feasible and affordable.

So far, self-healing solid materials rarely aspire to mend more than microcracks and scratching but these are more important than commonly realised because microcracks typically propagate to become major cracks and catastrophic failure. In addition, damage on a microscopic level has been shown to degrade thermal, electrical and acoustical properties of materials. Rapid advances are being made, including with semi-solid materials, one example being hydrogels in batteries that are increasingly flexible, even structural. They are less bulky and costly with the avoidance of protective encapsulation.

Expect self-healing materials to save lives, cost and the planet and become key enablers of the previously impossible such as unmanned factories and deep mining. Work is proceeding on self-healing solar panels and solid-state cooling on buildings. A self-healing drone for mission-critical operations? Added value materials manufacturers are now turning to these burgeoning business opportunities.

The image below shows some other aspects. Reports respectively on self-healing materials for healthcare and engineering are at www.zharresearch.com.