We want concrete to be a material for life that can heal itself again and again when wounded.
- Abir Al-Tabbaa
Skin is renewable and self-repairing – our first line of defence against the wear and tear of everyday life. If damaged, a myriad of repair processes spring into action to protect and heal the body. Clotting factors seal the break, a scab forms to protect the wound from infection, and healing agents begin to generate new tissue.
Taking inspiration from this remarkable living healthcare package, researchers are asking whether damage sensing and repair can be engineered into a quite different material: concrete.
Their aim is to produce a ‘material for life’, one with an in-built first-aid system that responds to all manner of physical and chemical damage by self-repairing, over and over again.
Self-healing materials were voted one of the top-ten emerging technologies in 2013 by the World Economic Forum, and are being actively explored in the aerospace industry, where they provide benefits in safety and longevity. But perhaps one area where self-healing might have the most widespread effect is in the concrete-based construction industry.
Concrete is everywhere you look: in buildings, bridges, motorways, and reservoir dams. It’s also in the places you can’t see: foundations, tunnels, underground nuclear waste facilities, and oil and gas wells. After water, concrete is the second most consumed product on earth; tonne for tonne, it is used annually twice as much as steel, aluminium, plastic and wood combined.
But, like most things, concrete has a finite lifespan. “Traditionally, civil engineering has built-in redundancy of design to make sure the structure is safe despite a variety of adverse events. But, over the long term, repair and eventual replacement is inevitable,” said Professor Abir Al-Tabbaa, from the Department of Engineering and the lead of the Cambridge component of the research project.
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Image:Healing material released when concrete microcapsules burst open
Credit: Tanvir Qureshi
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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