DEC 21

A team of engineers at the University of Illinois have figured out how to create self-healing circuits in electronics and batteries, a discovery that could lead to longer equipment life and make a nice dent in the piles of e-waste plaguing the planet.

As electronics have become more complex, one small circuit failure can render a device useless, especially since it is hard or often impossible to diagnose where that failure occurred to fix it. Nancy Sottos, an engineer working on the project said:

"In general there's not much avenue for manual repair. Sometimes you just can't get to the inside. In a multilayer integrated circuit, there's no opening it up. Normally you just replace the whole chip. It's true for a battery too. You can't pull a battery apart and try to find the source of the failure."

The solution her team came up with was an army of microcapsules about 10 microns in diameter dispersed along a circuit. When a crack occurs in the circuit, the microcapsules break open and release a liquid metal that fills in the crack and restores the electrical flow. The time between a failure and the microcapsules filling the crack is only a few microseconds.

In tests, 90 percent of the samples were healed to 99 percent of their original conductivity. It also require zero human intervention. Only the microcapsules intercepted by a crack opened while the others remained intact.

The engineers see this breakthrough as especially useful for air and spacecraft where miles of conductive wire would have to be gone through to diagnose a failure. The team, which originally used microcapsules to create self-healing polymers, want to see what other applications they may have.

via Physorg

Comments (5)

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Free access to original article
written by materialsdave, December 22, 2011

If you're interested in the science behind the story, we've made the original paper free to read: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adma.201102888 .

Dave Flanagan, Advanced Materials

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written by Markus, December 22, 2011

That is an interesting article and I hope it can help to reduce the electronic waste.

I found that the time of use of electronic devices I own has increased a lot over the years. Ten years ago, technology was improving very fast and I usually upgraded before anything broke. But nowadays, my computer and smartphone does pretty much everything I want and I start thinking about upgrading only when something broke and it is impossible or prohibitively expensive to repair it or to replace parts.

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Heat heals circuits too
written by Robin, December 31, 2011

A trick I learned when I introduced a visiting tech ("ewaste buyer") from Africa to a FreeGeek in Vermont. Putting circuit boards in an oven, or under the hot sun, cures a lot of problems. Hairline cracks in the solder can heal with heat. But this looks even better.

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electronics recycling
written by electronics recycling, February 07, 2012

We need to learn from nature which is replete with self repair strategies. This type of self-repair is usefull, but only a step in the right direction. Perhaps rather than having purely self-repairing pathways between components on a circuit board we could design board where alternate routes can be selected by the chips themselves.

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Re Self Healing PCBs
written by PC Disposal, August 20, 2012

RE-Balling circuit boards is an old technique to repair "dry solder joints", but it doesn't work on the actual PCB where the copper etched suface can crack- especially on laptops, which are constantly subjected to flexing of the casing and attached motherboard. This solution would most certainly get around that issue. My only concern at present is the continued use of landfill for electronics waste globally where electronics containing a "liquid metal" however small the volume, could inadvertantly grow exponentially given the volumes we dispose of each year. I might also be somewhat concerned about the need for my employees to handle hundreds of these each day as they're eventually recycled.

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