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New Reassembling Polymer-based Material
Schematic of optically healing polymers. The specially designed polymer molecules that make up the solid item can be disassembled by the UV light so that they flow and fill in the cracks. When the light is turned off, the molecules reassemble themselves and the filled cracks become rigid again.
The new polymer-based material was developed by a team of researchers in the U.S. and Switzerland, supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
To learn more, see NSF press release "Imagine: Material That If Scratched, You Can Quickly and Easily Fix Yourself, With Light Not Heat."
Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation, after Burnworth et al., Nature, April 21, 2011
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