It’s almost impossible to believe that synthetic materials can successfully mimic the largest organ of the human body: the skin. Our skin is responsible for sending information about the environment to the brain. Creating a synthetic material that can readily perform these roles required great innovation by Dr. Zhenan Bao and her Chemical Engineering team at Stanford University. While there have been many advances in this field over the past decade, the main obstacle was creating a material that was commercially feasible. In the past, most self-healing materials only worked at very high temperatures, or changed their mechanical structure when healing at room temperature. This, compounded with the fact that most self-healing materials were terrible conductors, was a major roadblock. Bao and her colleagues were able to overcome these issues.
How? They used a plastic held together by hydrogen bonds and weak electrostatic interactions, which can reconnect when the material is split. To render the material conductive, they embedded tiny pieces of nickel into the plastic compound. Additionally, the material can sense pressure and tension due to changes in distance between nickel particles. The result is a compound that is extremely sensitive to external stimuli and restores itself to 100 per cent capability with half an hour of being lesioned. What’s even more impressive is the composite compound’s ability to sense flexion. This ability makes this synthetic skin ideal for prosthetics. Synthetic skin can also be used to coat wires and electric devices, so as to decrease maintenance costs when damages occur.
Source: Science Daily
