Bid goodbye to broken phone screens thanks to this self-healing glass

Nine out of 10 people face the issue of broken or damaged mobile phone screens once in their life time. At times, despite of the screen protector, the damage gets to the screen, which is costly to repair. In order to solve this issue, researchers have created a glass that can heal itself when it’s pressed together.

Researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed a new kind of polymer that contains the ability to heal itself, an invention that will lead to future self-healing mobile phones. The material is a unique hard glass-like polymer that is known as ‘polyether-thioureas’ and is able to heal itself by only applying hand pressure, as compared to other self-healing products that require heat to heal themselves.

“High mechanical robustness and healing ability tend to be mutually exclusive. In most cases, heating to high temperatures, on the order of 120 degrees Celsius or more, to reorganize their cross-linked networks is necessary for the fractured portions to repair,” said the researchers.

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According to The Guardian, this special glass polymer was found by mistake of a graduate student, who actually thought the material would become a kind of glue. The student then noticed that the ‘glue’ was able to hold on to itself when cut, compressed and held together for maximum 30 seconds at room temperature.

However, this discovery is not the first time any self-healing material has been formed. The quality making the glass unique is that it’s structurally strong, but also able to self-heal when pressed within seconds and that too at room temperature without requiring any heat, wrote Science Alert.

“I hope the repairable glass becomes a new environment-friendly material that avoids the need to be thrown away if broken,” said Yu Yanagisawa, the graduate student who founded the polymer.

The research titled ‘Mechanically robust, readily repairable polymers via tailored non-covalent cross-linking’ has been published in the journal Science.