Smartphones will soon repair themselves

Smartphones are everywhere, and every single smartphone user has faced the same dilemma- a cracked screen. If your phone screen breaks, your options are to take it to a repair place and pay a couple hundred to get it replaced or to just buy a brand new one. The cost of repairing the screen often outweighs the cost you paid upfront for the phone, so most people decide to suck it up and just live with the cracks. Broken screens don’t get any better with time; in fact they often get way worse. With the potential of cutting yourself, losing touch capacity on the screen, or having debris sink in through the cracks it seems like paying a repair person to fix it is the best option, until recently.

Scientists from the University of California, Riverside just developed a polymer that self-heals in the event of cracks or scratches, for use in things like phone screens or artificial muscles.  The material they’ve created is made from a stretchy polymer and an ionic salt which creates a bond called an ion-dipole force. The material has the ability to stretch over 50 times its original size and can stitch itself back together 24 hours after it has been completely cracked.

“A self-healing material, when carved in two parts, can go back together like nothing has happened, just like human skin,” says Chao Wang, the lead researcher on the project. This concept isn’t a very new one, LG released a phone called the G Flex in 2013 that had the capacity to heal the back of the phone when it was scratched or damaged. The G Flex’s material was non-conductible so it isn’t able to be used on the screen. This new material is the first that features electricity conducting properties.

Wang stated that we could see this material being used on smartphones within the next few years. Wang has also been working on a lithium-ion battery that rebuilds and heals itself when dropped and actually becomes stronger.

A blog post from UC Riverside highlighted the benefits of this material, stating that it is transparent, self-healing and highly stretchable. The ability of the material to be electrically activated makes it useful in improvement of batteries, robots, and electronic devices. The researchers are currently working on making the material able to function in extreme weather conditions. They say that when water (like snow or humidity) comes into the picture it messes with the functioning of the material and its abilities to self heal.

“Self healing materials may seem far away for real application,” says Wang, “but I believe they will come out very soon with cell phones.”