Scientists have created a self-healing anti-corrosion coating. This was reported by ETH Zurich and scientific article published In polymers.
Steel and some other building materials are exposed to corrosion – negative chemical and physical changes under the influence of the environment. All countries together invest about 3.5% of the world’s annual gross domestic product in corrosion protection, which is approximately $4,000 billion.
Markus Niederberger and colleagues have developed a plastic that can greatly improve and simplify corrosion protection. This is called poly(phenyleneethylene) or PPM. It comes in a variety of form factors: for example, it can be kneaded, heated, and sprayed like paint to coat a surface. After that, it will harden like ordinary paint.
Moreover, it independently repairs any damage without additional external intervention. At the end of its life, the polymer can be completely removed and recycled with minimal material loss and then applied to another surface without losing its special properties and functions.
The discovery was made by accident. The authors worked on the fabrication of nanoparticles in a special organic solvent. Under certain conditions, the solvent solidified – polymerized. “It was unintentional and undesirable,” Niederberger recalls. “At first we didn’t know what to do with it.”
But they later discovered that the polymer they had accidentally created, called PPM at the time, had an interesting property in addition to its high thermal stability: according to conventional knowledge, such materials did fluoresce, although they did not. This brought more attention to PPM, and gradually scientists discovered that it could be done to “magnify” any violations in the material’s structure.
The authors hope that their discovery will make it possible to protect structural elements from moisture, salt and other corrosive environments in a more environmentally friendly way.