Scientists Make a Self-healing Rubber Band

[Snaploud]

Snap! Scientists make a self-healing rubber band

30 minutes ago

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Anyone who has heard the snap of a rubber band breaking knows it's time to reach for a replacement.


But a group of French scientists have made a self-healing rubber band material that can reclaim its stretchy usefulness by simply pressing the broken edges back together for a few minutes.

The material, described on Wednesday in the journal Nature, can be broken and repaired over and over again.

It is made from simple ingredients -- fatty acids like those found in vegetable oils, and urea, a waste compound in urine that can be made synthetically.

The material would be an asset to industry and might even help shed light on the physics of elasticity, wrote Philippe Cordier and colleagues at the Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution in Paris.

...

"A final blessing is that it can be broken down with heat and easily recycled -- so it is environmentally friendly, too."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080221/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_rubber_band;_ylt=Av2ucFg9hnHyE2emBN9g0d.s0NUE

 

[All Seeing Eye]

What possible use is a piece of rubber that can self heal itself?

 

[Lindley]

Fire said:
What possible use is a piece of rubber that can self heal itself?

T-600s.

 

[Meredith]

Lindley said:

Fire said:
What possible use is a piece of rubber that can self heal itself?

T-600s.

Umm, don't you mean T-650s. The 600 series didn't have self healing tendons, they used a silicone rubber that was not self healing. They introduced self healing rubber tendons in the T-650 series and greater. The T-650 through T-690 were so much better utilized in skynet than the T-600 through T-645 models.

 

[Lindley]

You know more than me. All I know is, "rubber skin."

 

[PlixTixiplik]

Fire said:
What possible use is a piece of rubber that can self heal itself?

Ever had to replace a broken fan belt in your car?

Having rubber belts that are less likely to break will be a big money-saver in a wide variety of industrial applications. Less downtime on machines when belts break, less expense to replace rubber belts, etc.

-MEC

 

[All Seeing Eye]

PlixTixiplik said:

Fire said:
What possible use is a piece of rubber that can self heal itself?

Ever had to replace a broken fan belt in your car?

Having rubber belts that are less likely to break will be a big money-saver in a wide variety of industrial applications. Less downtime on machines when belts break, less expense to replace rubber belts, etc.

-MEC

But it only heals itself when pushed back together so if a fan belt is ripping then it makes no difference if it was normal rubber or healing rubber because it'll not heal and will eventually break like usual.

 

[FordSVT]

Fire said:
What possible use is a piece of rubber that can self heal itself?

You would make a very poor engineer.

 

[MIB]

Fire said:

PlixTixiplik said:

Fire said:
What possible use is a piece of rubber that can self heal itself?

Ever had to replace a broken fan belt in your car?

Having rubber belts that are less likely to break will be a big money-saver in a wide variety of industrial applications. Less downtime on machines when belts break, less expense to replace rubber belts, etc.

-MEC

But it only heals itself when pushed back together so if a fan belt is ripping then it makes no difference if it was normal rubber or healing rubber because it'll not heal and will eventually break like usual.

Wow. Ok. The belt snaps. You can either shut the machine down for hours to have it replaced entirely and go through the expense of getting a brand new belt and tossing the old one. Or you can just press it back together and have it repaired in a few minutes with little to no expense.

Nope. There's definitely no advantage to that. Move along.

 

[zephramc]

I wonder if this material could be applied in spacesuits? An astronaut wouldn't need to worry as much about puncturing his/her suit (assuming that's a concern). Not sure how well the rubber material would work in the cold of space.

 

[comsol]

The one important thing that is not mentioned in this article is that this material is weaker than ordinary rubber. Normal rubber polymer chains are crosslinked with three types of of chemical bonds. This type of rubber only uses one of them - hydrogen bonds which can be easily broken and reformed - which is the weakest of the three (the other two are covalent and ionic bonds). The result is that what you gain in self-repairability you lose in strength - at least for now.