Scientists developed "Wolverine Fabric" , Inspired material that heals itself.

Those who are fond of American comic books must have heard the name "WOLVERINE ", who has a power of self-healing, appearing in American comic books, published by Marvel Comics, mostly in association with the X-Men.

Self-healing materials are synthetically created, which has the built-in ability to repair damages automatically to themselves without any external diagnosis of the problem or human intervention where Generally, materials degraded overtime during operation for incurring various problems.

So Inspired by this comic book character Wolverine, scientists (including some are from the University of California), Riverside, have developed a self-healing, mechanically stretchable, ionic conductor, meaning materials that ions can flow through & that's transparent. Self-healing material can be used to power artificial muscles and could be used to improve the lifetime of batteries, electronic devices, aircraft’s, space vehicles & robots.

It's created by combining a polar, stretchable polymer with ionic salt. When activated by an electrical stimulus; the resultant end product is a soft, rubber-like, and malleable material that's easy to produce at minimum cost. It can be stretched to 50 times its original length without breaking & it can completely re-attach or heal, in 24 hours at room temperature after cut in. In fact, after only five minutes of healing, the material can be stretched two times its original length.

The material has potential applications in a wide range of fields. It could give robots the ability to self-heal after mechanical failure; extend the lifetime of lithium-ion batteries used in electronics and electric cars & can improve the activity of biosensors used in the medical field and environmental monitoring.Even NASA's Langley Research Center is working on building self-healing material.

Wolverine fabric has already been used in The “Mission Mangalyaan" which was initially estimated to survive around six months, but it is still active from which we can get an idea about the durability of this fabric.
In addition, it can also be used as a cover for military, navy, and firefighter's clothing.

Not only bring new dimensions in the 4th Revolution in the textile sector, but it will also minimize the limitations of our traditional textiles by providing continuous healing over a lifetime, integrating material surface, and recovering mechanical strength up to 80-90%.


References:
1.https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2017/0102/Scientists-develop-Wolverine-inspired-material-that-heals-itself
2.https://technology.nasa.gov/patent/LAR-TOPS-132
3.Wikipedia.org

Khadiza Newaz
Department of TMDM, 44th Batch
Bangladesh University Of Textiles (BUTEX).