Self Healing Natural Rubber
Channel: Raa Khimi Shuib
Date: 2018-04-23

SELF HEALING NATURAL RUBBER

by Dr Raa Khimi, Universiti Sains Malaysia

Increasing numbers of new elastomeric materials being developed with the aim of improving its performance in challenging applications. Indeed to the properties of elastomeric materials which can sustain large deflections with little or no permanent deformation, rubbers still fail through fracture and fatigue processes. Self-healing rubbers are a new class of smart materials that have the capability to repair themselves and to recover functionality when they are damaged without the need for detection or repair by manual intervention of any kind. Emerging self-healing provides rubbers the capability to arrest crack propagation at an early stage thereby preventing catastrophic failures. In this work, a novel self-healing additive was developed and the concepts of mixing both covalent and reversible bonds to fabricate self-healing rubber was proposed. The results revealed that the developed self-healing natural rubber able to recover 80% of its initial mechanical properties in a minutes and almost 100% in 10 minutes at room temperature without the aid of any external resources. The self-healing additive was develop using ready available industrial raw materials and the self-healing rubbers can be processed using typical rubber processing equipment. Some of the potential products that could be benefit from the advantages of this materials are tires, industrial rubber good, cable, hoses, belting, bearing, mounting and footwares.