Self Healing Rubber
An essential part of product development is analyzing the failure modes for a particular product. This ensures that the product will (probably) not fail after just a few uses. In many applications where every penny (or gram) counts, making the product work just long enough to be satisfactory without over-engineering it is one of the most exhaustive and difficult parts of the design and manufacturing process.
Up until recently, if any part of the case or structure failed, it meant that the entire system would fail, necessitating all kinds of careful analysis and design to reduce the chance of this happening. Now, self-healing materials are showing some promise for the not-too-distant future.
Not long ago, a material was developed which contained microcapsules or micro-channels of epoxy which would be ruptured if the material was broken or cut, and the epoxy would heal the ‘wound’. click here for more info
Now, this new development doesn’t even need such epoxy to heal itself, but instead uses a novel new molecular design to ‘grow’ over cuts and breaks. Granted, this is very early in development, but once such a seemingly magic material becomes feasible to use in commercial products, it could make a massive impact on the way we see and create new products.
