Self-healing body parts for automobiles

Damaged car? It will soon self-heal!

You cut yourself in the finger - and a few days later your skin has completely healed again. Biological organisms have an amazing ability to automatically initiate self-healing and self-repair when they sustain damage. Imagine self-repairing cars, planes, bridges or buildings. These materials could be of particular use in structures that are at present impractical or impossible to repair, such as electronic circuit boards, implanted medical devices or spacecraft. Self-repairing materials would have a massive impact on virtually all industries, lengthening product lifetimes, increasing safety, and lowering product costs by reducing maintenance requirements. Thanks to nanotechnology, these visions are coming closer to reality.

Nickel titanium is a shape memory alloy. The material, if deformed while cool, returns to its undeformed shape when warmed. Other shape-memory alloys (SMA) have since been discovered. Some of these alloys include CuSn, InTi, TiNi, and MnCu. TiNi alloys and copper-based alloys are the most commonly used. It has been found that they can recover substantial amounts of strain, and/or generate significant force, when changing shape.

Smart materials actively respond to the stimulus of mechanical stress imposed on the material, causing the compromised region to self-heal and restore partially or completely, the properties of the material. Applications of self-healing materials span several sectors: composites, building and construction materials, foams, films, coatings, plastics, concrete, etc.
Each individual type of smart material has a different property which can be significantly altered, such as viscosity, volume, and conductivity. The property that can be altered influences what types of applications the smart material can be used for.
Within the next few years a number of cars will possess body parts—such as air dams and handles—made out of shape memory alloys. Self-cleaning glass and scratch-resistant panels will also become the norm. Slightly longer term, self-healing rubber -- such as BASF is developing—will be incorporated into cars.

Watch the smart materials demo at : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU-dChOfkAg
Also in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_memory_alloys
Read more at : http://corporate.gitverlag.com/media/article/169475/Dow_CMI0509.pdf