Week of 10/17 Free Post

Week of 10/17 Free Post

News Article "Cracked Metal Heal Thyself"

Hello again, for this weeks blog post I decided to look up a news article off a very credible website, MIT. I was a bit stuck for ideas this week so I figured analyzing an interesting news article couldn't be a bad choice. If you search for "news in material science" on Google, you can find many results. I went with MIT since I know it's a rather credible website. 

I chose an article with the title "Cracked Metal Heal Thyself." This seemed interesting to me. Apparently under certain conditions pulling metal apart actually caused the cracks to fuse together. This shocked MIT students, at first they actually thought it was a mistake! The metal that they seen this happen with was nickel, but supposedly could work with other metals too. They haven't quite cracked why it happens yet but they are working on it. However, they believe that this technology could be used to create self healing material that would stop damage before it has time to spread. This could be extremely useful in something like an oil well deep in the ocean. 

Being someone who is going into the metallurgic side of material science, I thought this was fascinating. The idea of a metal that could heal itself is amazing. This could be possibly be used to stop some disasters before they even happen. Metal fatigue, which is caused my nanocracks forming over time, could possibly be eliminated since the self healing material would repair these nanocracks when they happen!

Chandler, David. "Cracked Metal Heal Thyself." MIT. MIT, October 9, 2013.             Web. October 18, 2013.