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Are you nervous when someone borrows your phone? Not because they might invade your privacy, but simply because they might drop her and break her glass? You are not alone, and researchers at the Indian Institute for Scientific Education and Research (IISER) in Kolkata may have just found the perfect material to make a smartphone screen: a transparent material that is hard and which repairs itself when cracked.
Scientists have been working for decades to develop materials that can heal themselves, and they have had some success as well. For example, researchers at the American Chemical Society were able to develop small swimming robots that could magnetically heal themselves, while researchers at the National University of Singapore took a different approach by making a smart foam material. which allows robot hands to self-repair and detect objects. .
However, one problem with these projects is that they are flexible and opaque and are not very suitable for rugged applications. So the researchers at IISER, along with those at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur decided to focus on developing something harder than conventional self-healing material, like the report The India Telegraph.
The researchers used a piezoelectric organic material, which converts mechanical energy into electrical energy and vice versa, to make needle-shaped crystals that are no more than 2mm long or 0.2mm wide, according to experimental results published in the journal. Science.
Due to their molecular arrangement in specially designed crystals, a strong force of attraction has developed between two surfaces. Whenever a fracture occurred, the forces of attraction would join the pieces again, without the need for an external stimulus such as heat or others that most self-healing materials would need.
“Our self-healing material is 10 times harder than others, and it has a well-ordered internal crystal structure, which is preferred in most electronic and optical applications,” said lead researcher Professor Chilla Malla Reddy of IISER.
“I can imagine apps for an everyday device,” said Bhanu Bhushan Khatua, member of the IIT Kharagpur team. “Such materials could be used for cell phone screens which will repair themselves if they fall off and develop cracks.”
There is only one problem, however. It may not be released and available by the time you go out to get your next smartphone.
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