Abstract
SCRATCHES, CUTS, and cracks, although they may seem small, can add up to big bucks when they’re in polymer coatings. Just ask anyone who’s found a scratch to their car’s paint job. Thanks to a family of metallosupramolecular polymers, spot-repairing damage to paints, coatings, and polymer thin films could one day be as simple as shining an ultraviolet light on them ( Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09963). The self-healing material, which comes from a group led by Stuart J. Rowan of Case Western Reserve University and Christoph Weder of the University of Fribourg, in Switzerland, is based on short polymer chains that terminate in a ligand that can coordinate to a metal ion. “When we put in a metal ion—in this case either zinc or lanthanum—the components bind to the metal and essentially form a high-molecular-weight polymer,” Rowan explains. When light shines on the polymer, the metal-binding ligands absorb the light’s energy and convert it into heat, ...
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