Engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created a plastic that can fix itself if it gets cracked or broken. The plastic polymer can reportedly patch holes measuring just over one inch, which is one hundred times larger than the damage fixed by materials that had been tested previously.

Engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created a plastic that can fix itself if it gets cracked or broken.

The plastic polymer can reportedly patch holes measuring just over one inch, which is a hundred times larger than the damage fixed by materials that had been tested previously.

The design of the new plastic material was influenced by the human blood clotting system that sends certain chemicals to a damaged area to help heal itself.

It could be used for a variety of products or electronics like cellphone screens, electronic chips, or satellites.

For the study, researchers made a hole in the material, which reportedly took 20 minutes to repair itself with liquid gel from microchannels, and three hours to dry and solidify, retaining 62 percent of its original strength.

Co-author of the study, Jeffrey Moore, a chemist from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is quoted as saying: "You can think of these microchannels as a vascular system, like blood vessels. As more liquid was pumped through the channels, the gel eventually spanned the entire damaged region and resulted in filling of the void space."

This study is a step towards the self-repairing materials of the future that can fix even larger kinds of damage.