Cut your finger, and your body starts mending the wound even before you have had time to go and find a Band-Aid. Synthetic materials are not so forgiving, but Nancy R. Sottos, Scott R. White and their colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are looking to change all that. They developed a self-healing plastic that contains a three dimensional network of microscopic capillaries filled with a liquid healing agent. More...
In a display of nature's restorative powers, human skin has the ability to heal itself when cut. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois have invented materials that do the same thing. More...
New sol-gel inks developed by researchers at the University of Illinois can be printed into patterns to producage three-dimensional structures of metal oxides with nanoscale features. More...
The latest photonic device built by researchers at the University of Illinois, a so-called inverse woodpile structure, is made of germanium which has a higher refractive index than silicon. "Until now, all woodpile structures have been composed of solid or hollow rods in an air matrix," said Paul Braun, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. Their new germanium matrix containing a periodic array of tubular holes has one of the widest photonic band gaps ever reported (as large as 25%). "In many applications, from low-threshold lasers to highly efficient solar cells, photonic crystals with wide band gaps may be required". More...
ScienCentral News and WBKO - Even high tech machines like the space shuttle need the occasional repair. But what if materials like plastics could repair themselves? As this ScienCentral News video reports, scientists are doing just that by imitating how our bodies work to heal small wounds. More...
(BusinessWeek) - Plants and animals can repair themselves thanks to circulatory systems that carry healing agents to wounded tissue. Researchers at the Univ. of Illinois have created a new plastic that fixes itself the same way. The material is embedded with channels about as wide as a human hair. More...
Germanium inverse woodpile 3D photonic crystals with a large (25%) photonic band gap in the infrared (background image) were fabricated through a multistep replication procedure. A polymer scaffold was first created by direct-write assembly, followed by the conformal growth of oxide and semiconductor layers, and removal of the polymer and oxide (foreground), as reported on p. 1567 by Paul Braun, Jennifer Lewis, and co-workers.
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The New York Times (June 19) -- Creation of polymer composites that can seal tiny cracks as they appear has long been a goal of chemists and engineers. Such materials could be useful in airplane wings, for example, which can develop cracks under the stress of flight. Scientists at Illinois are reporting progress toward that goal. Nancy R. Sottos, a U. of I. professor of materials science and engineering, said the current research built on earlier work on a system that uses microcapsules filled with a healing agent and embedded throughout the surface of the material. When a crack occurs, nearby capsules break and release the chemicals, which flow into the crack. More...
Technology Review -- Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have made a polymer material that can heal itself repeatedly when it cracks. It's a significant advance toward self-healing medical implants and self-repairing materials for use in airplanes and spacecraft. It could also be used for cooling microprocessors and electronic circuits, and it could pave the way toward plastic coatings that regenerate themselves. More...
Paul Braun, a University Scholar and a professor of materials science and engineering, and Jennifer Lewis, the Thurnauer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and interim director of the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, have created a germanium inverse woodpile structure that has one of the widest photonic band gaps ever reported. More...
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The principal activities of the Lewis Group involve colloidal assembly of materials, understanding the phase behavior and rheological properties of complex fluids, and direct ink writing of planar and 3D structures.
