Self Healing Rubber: Vegetable Oil and Urea

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Self Healing Rubber: Vegetable Oil and Urea

May 16 2011 12:38:41 pm EST

Topics: Advanced Materials, Science,

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Mix vegetable oil with urea and what do you get? Self-healing rubber.

Scientists in Paris created a rubber that can be torn in half and reattached at room temperature, simply by placing the ends together. After 15 minutes, the rubber can be stretched to twice its normal length without breaking.

The self-healing rubber was made in the lab of Ludwik Leibler, at the Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution in Paris. Leibler and his colleagues built up their rubber from simple starting materials — fatty acids and urea (that’s vegetable oil and a component of urine). Their research was published in Nature.

Unlike normal rubber, which utilizes a long chain of molecules covalently bonded, Leibler’s approach was to use small molecular groups: the fatty acids from vegetable oil. Reacting these molecules with urea in a two-step process stuck nitrogen-containing chemical groups (amides and imidazolidones) onto the ends of the fatty acids. The fatty acids link to each other using hydrogen bonds — a strong attractive force between hydrogen and another atom, and the bond responsible for holding water molecules to each other.

The resulting rubber can be stretched to five times its normal length, though it takes far longer to return to its original length than normal rubber: about a minute.

You can read more about Liebler and the rubber here

Dates:

2011

2010