Image used with permission of the copyright holder Dropping your phone is a virtual inevitability, and if you live dangerously — ie, don’t use a case — it can end badly. A chipped, scratched or broken smartphone screen usually means a trip to the local repair shop, but University of California scientists may have developed a better alternative: a screen that can be repaired yourself.
UC Riverside chemists have developed a material that can repair itself from cuts and scrapes. They tore it in half and watched it come back together in less than 24 hours, and stretched it to 50 times its original size, just to see that it remained functional.
The secret is the forgiving chemical bond between the molecules.
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There are two bonds in materials, Chao Wang, a chemist leading research into self-healing materials, explained to Science Daily: Covalent bonds, which are strong and don’t regenerate easily once broken; and non-covalent bonds, which are weaker. The hydrogen bonds that bind water fit into the first, non-covalent category — they are constantly broken and remade, giving water its fluidity.
The polymer developed by Wang’s team is held together by ion-dipole bonding, the force between charged ions and polar molecules. The polar, stretchy polymer and ionic salt bond tightly—enough to pull the material together when it breaks.
This material is particularly suitable for smartphones because it conducts electricity, Wang told Business Insider. Capacitive touch screens have electrodes underneath that complete a circuit when in contact with a conductive material. That’s how phones recognize taps, taps, and swipes.
Self-healing smartphone materials aren’t new — the back cover of LG’s G Flex can heal itself from small scratches. But they could not conduct electricity.
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Moving forward, the researchers hope to improve the material’s properties. They test it in difficult conditions, such as high humidity. “Previous self-healing polymers did not perform well at high humidity,” Wang told Science Daily. “Water gets inside and spoils things. May change mechanical properties. We are currently altering the covalent bonds within the polymer itself to prepare these materials for real-world applications.”
Wang predicts that this new self-healing material will make its way into phone screens and batteries by 2020.
“Self-healing materials may seem far off for real-world applications, but I believe they will appear very soon with mobile phones,” he told Business Insider. “Within three years, more self-healing products will hit the market and change our daily lives. This will make our mobile phones achieve much better performance than what they can currently achieve.”
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Source: newstars.edu.vn