That scratch on your car could soon be fixed with light
Did a visit to the supermarket end with a scratch on your new car?
That dreaded feeling when you get home and realise a supermarket trolley was cast adrift!
You kick the tyres, curse at the lack of bumpers on trolleys and look around for who to blame.
Ahead of you is the laborious process of getting the scratch fixed. While repairs to car paintwork have become easier with mobile services, it still takes time, is expensive and often hard to revert the paintwork to the shine of a new car.
Paint is one of the many substances that rely on polymers for its make-up. While polymers are the everyday work of science and chemists, to many the term is unfamiliar and yet they are everywhere. Polymers are materials made from long chains of repeating molecules and every day you are likely to come in contact with synthetic polymers found in phones, computers, water bottles, tyres, plastics and glass. There are also naturally occurring polymers in trees and rubber and even DNA is a natural polymer.
What is a polymer?
A simple way to think of a polymer is as a chemical made of repeating units often comprising hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sometimes other elements such as silicon and sulphur. These substances are then polymerized together in a chemical reaction that results in linked molecules. If you recall the paper chains you made as a child that relied on linkages, you are on your way to visualising polymers.
Australia is a super power in polymer science and has led the world in using polymers to produce the first banknotes that address the age old problem of notes that fall apart in the wash. The plastic bank notes are machine washable and provide much higher levels of security to minimise forging.
So what do polymers have to do with the paint scratch on your car? Currently the polymer composition in paint makes it a relatively rigid substance which means that it does not have the flexibility to heal without multiple processes applied.
Light applied differently could provide paint that heals easier when scratched
QUT researchers in collaboration with the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg in Germany, have recently been awarded a $700,000 grant over three years from the VW Foundation to further investigate the use of light in polymer composition. The Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg was the home of renowned chemist Hermann Staudinger, who is considered the father of the modern polymer and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1953 for “his discoveries in the field of macromolecular chemistry.”
The QUT project led by Professor Barner-Kowollik, Chair in Materials Chemistry at QUT, will explore using light as a chemical tool to make and break bonds, with a focus on how the interplay of light in the chemical reactions used to make polymers can affect their structure.
“Through this work we hope to generate the next stage of polymer development with polymeric materials being either more flexible or more rigid depending on the colour of light that it they exposed to. Light might make a polymer more flexible such as in car paint, meaning the scratch could be healed simply by shining light on it.”
“We already know that different light colours affect can effectively alter chemical bonding and our research looks to further understand this for a new era of adaptable polymers that will further enhance many areas including 3D printing and soft robotics,” says Professor Barner-Kowollik.
“Most robotics rely on hard wiring to create movement and we believe there can be a new generation of robots built on polymers that are programmable using light to create movement,” adds Professor Andreas Walther who is leading the German-side of the collaboration with the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg.
The project is thus seeking to explore light and polymers to facilitate reprogrammable materials.
