Metal Can Heal Itself. Yes, You Read That Right.
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A new study found that metal can heal itself.
On the scale of nanometers, cracks caused by fatigue damage were seen to heal themselves to the point that they completely disappeared.
Self-healing properties have been observed in other materials before, metals were long thought to not have that ability at all.
It turns out that metal can heal itself. No kidding. Much like your skin will heal after a paper cut, certain small cracks in metal will, under the right circumstances, just… fix themselves. They disappear as if they were never there at all.
“This was absolutely stunning to watch first-hand,” Brad Boyce, Sandia materials scientist and one of the researchers behind this discovery, said in a press release. “What we have confirmed is that metals have their own intrinsic, natural ability to heal themselves, at least in the case of fatigue damage at the nanoscale.”
Now, the word “nanoscale” is important here. The cracks that were seen exhibiting these self-healing behaviors were incredibly tiny, measured in nanometers. But considering that we were pretty sure that metal couldn’t do this on any level, the scale doesn’t make this any less of a big deal.
“Cracks in metals were only ever expected to get bigger, not smaller. Even some of the basic equations we use to describe crack growth preclude the possibility of such healing processes,” Boyce said in a news release.
The discovery, recently published in the journal Nature, came about a bit by accident. A group of researchers from Sandia National Laboratories and Texas A&M University were observing a tiny piece of platinum to better understand how cracks from fatigue damage—the damage caused by general wear and tear on a material over time—forms in and spread throughout the metal.
To do this, they placed the platinum in a vacuum and used a specially developed electron microscope technique to pull on the ends of the material around 200 times per second. For a while, the team was just observing the cracks and following along to understand their progress.
But 40 minutes in, the damage began to reverse itself. After a while, there was no trace of the original crack at all (though, new cracks did eventually form).
While this wasn’t what anyone expected to find in this experiment, one researcher was especially pleased with the results. Michael Demkowicz, one of the authors on the study, had pioneered the theory that metal could self-heal under certain circumstances back in 2013. After digitally modeling what the team saw in a lab, he confirmed that what they were seeing was in fact what he predicted a decade ago. “I was very glad to hear it, of course,” he said in a press release.
Now, the game becomes one of generalization—investigating how this remarkable finding can be use in as many ways as possible. Imagine a bridge that is always at its maximum strength and never wears out, or a building that could fix itself right back up after an earthquake.
Obviously, those dreams are still incredibly far off—if they’re even possible at all. There’s still a lot to look into before we can decide exactly what this discovery means. But maybe, just maybe, it could change the world.
“My hope,” Demkowicz said in a news release, “is that this finding will encourage materials researchers to consider that, under the right circumstances, materials can do things we never expected.”
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