A team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego, led by ECS member Joseph Wang, recently developed new magnetic ink that can be used to make self-healing batteries, electrochemical sensors, and wearable, textile-based electrical circuits.
The ink is made up of microparticles set up in a certain configuration by a magnetic field. The particles on each respective side of the tear in a circuit are then attracted towards each other, resulting in the self-healing effect. The devices have the ability to repair tears as wide as 3 millimeters, which is a record in the field of self-healing systems.
While there are other self-healing materials in the field, they require an external trigger to start the process, which takes anywhere from a few min to days. The new work does not require any outside catalyst and works in 0.05 seconds