RE: How this self-healing material can sense when there's trouble
This is marginally useful for space bound projects. Polymers do
not fare well in that environment. What is necessary are nanobot
graphene manipulators and re-cross linkers. These tiny bots
would walk along the graphene thin films and re-weave broken
lattices... those could fix micro-meteor damage, and thus repair
tiny air leaks, with a material strong enough to stand up to
spacecraft use. The technology as described in this article is
more integrated than previous efforts at the same function, but
self repairing polymer have, for instance, already been
demonstrated for fighter aircraft cowlings, using a Nd:YAG laser
with a total internal reflection interferometric crack and occlusion
detection system. It works, but again, has limited application for
space. Also, both the interferometric (described by me here) and
the integrated composite versions (of this article) are
...expensive. Did you ask him how much per square meter his
technology would cost to add to some application? Ouch. For
robots who do fragile nondurable applications, such as clean
room operations, this would work, but then... in that environment,
you wouldn't need it.
