Self Healing Materials

 Impressive direction introduced here, ultimately linked to healing,  'intelligent' materials.

Imperial College London researchers have created 3D building blocks that can heal themselves in response to damage.

The engineered living materials (ELMs) exploit biology’s ability to heal and replenish material and could respond to damage in harsh environments using a sense-and-response system.

We’ve created living materials that can detect damage and respond to it by healing themselves.

Professor Tom Ellis:  Department of Bioengineering  Imperial College London

This work, published in Nature Communications  , could lead to the creation of real-world materials that detect and heal their own damage, such as fixing a crack in a windshield, a tear in the fuselage of an aircraft or a pothole in the road. By integrating the building blocks into self-healing building materials, scientists could reduce the amount of maintenance needed and extend a material’s life and usefulness.

Lead author Professor Tom Ellis of the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial said: “In the past we’ve created living materials with inbuilt sensors that can detect environmental cues and changes. Now we’ve created living materials that can detect damage and respond to it by healing themselves.”... '