The human skin, with all its frailties, turns out to be difficult to recreate, let alone improve on. The main challenge: It manages to be both self-healing and sensitive to the touch, enabling it to send vital information to the brain about temperature and pressure.
Researchers say their material repairs itself in just 30 minutes.
(Credit: Stanford University)
But chemists and engineers at Stanford say they are one step closer to developing an electronic skin that has both these properties, and they report this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology that it could help lead to smarter prosthetics and more resilient, self-repairing electronics.
Their central task was to find a self-healing material (a plastic polymer would ordinarily do the trick) that was also a good conductor of electricity (which typically requires metals). "To interface this kind of material with the digital world, ideally you want it to be conductive," Benjamin Chee-Keong Tee, a researcher on the project, said in a school news release.
They found that a plastic made of long chains of molecules linked up via hydrogen bonds provided weak attractions between differently charge... [Read more]
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