Focus on self-healing materials: recent challenges and innovations

摘要

One of the material researchers’ dreams is to createartificial materials that have the same functions asnatural materials, such as living things. Self-healingmaterial is a material that has a function found inorganisms, and naturally exhibits extremely highrobust performance. Owing to such a dream function,self-healing materials have been independentlyresearched and developed for each particular materialsystem, such as metal, ceramics, concrete, polymer,and composite material. There is a long history ofthe research on self-healing materials. For example,self-healing ceramics were first reported in the 1960s.Tracing back with the development of stainless steel to1904, we would notice that stainless steel could also beconsidered as one of the self-healing materials, as itsoxidation protection layer is spontaneously repaired.Going even further back in history, the first report ofself-healing concrete by the precipitation of calciumcarbonate can be found as early as 1836.