Microfractures in nano-size copper and platinum have been observed healing themselves from repeated tugs. The discovery could lead to the construction of self-healing structures and machines.
Of course, there are lots of industries whose product engineers would love to translate this finding into intentional engineering approaches to create metals that automatically heal themselves in our structural applications," lead-author Brad Boyce, a materials scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, told Live Science. “Self-healing metals could be useful in a wide range of applications from airplane wings to automotive suspensions.”
So I am not giving that clickbait title a view. Anyone have a summary? What is new here? Self-healing materials aren’t new, and stainless steel is self-healing so the whole “first time” claim is obviously B.S. unless it is tied to some specific novel property.
It’s cold welding, and not even in a novel way. They used a vacuum and pretended this was some new phenomenon that we haven’t known about for around the past 80 years.
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So I am not giving that clickbait title a view. Anyone have a summary? What is new here? Self-healing materials aren’t new, and stainless steel is self-healing so the whole “first time” claim is obviously B.S. unless it is tied to some specific novel property.
Here is the abstract in nature
Spoiler alert: “However, unexpectedly, cracks were also observed to heal by a process that can be described as crack flank cold welding (etc…)”.
It’s cold welding, and not even in a novel way. They used a vacuum and pretended this was some new phenomenon that we haven’t known about for around the past 80 years.
It will also be useful to the Borg.
Or the replicators from Stargate…
Police departments enter the conversation. ;)