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Biological Archetypes for Self-Healing Materials

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Self-healing Materials

Part of the book series: Advances in Polymer Science ((POLYMER,volume 273))

Abstract

Damage and fatigue are ever-present facts of life. Given enough time, even the most robust material, whether man-made or natural, succumbs to the deleterious effects of cracks, fissures, and defects during normal use. Traditionally, materials engineers have approached this problem by creating damage-tolerant structures, intensive quality control before use, vigilant inspection during use, and designing materials to function well below their theoretical limit. Living organisms, on the other hand, routinely produce materials that function close to their theoretical limit as a result of their remarkable ability to self-heal a range of non-catastrophic damage events. For this reason, many researchers in the last 15 years have turned to nature for inspiration for the design and development of self-healing composites and polymeric materials. However, these efforts have so far only scratched the surface of the richness of natural self-repair processes. In the present review, we provide an overview of some paradigmatic and well-studied examples of self-repair in living systems. The core of this overview takes the form of a number of case studies that provide a detailed description of the structure–function relationships defining the healing mechanism. Case studies include a number of examples dependent on cellular action in both animals (e.g., limb regeneration, antler growth, bone healing, and wound healing) and plants (e.g., latex-based healing, plant grafting, and wound closure in woody vines and succulent plants). Additionally, we examine several examples of acellular self-repair in biopolymeric materials (e.g., mussel byssus, caddisfly silks, and whelk egg capsules) that are already inspiring the development of a number of self-healing polymers.

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Acknowledgement

The authors thank A. Miserez and R. Stewart for providing images for figures, and C. Neinhuis for helpful input. Part of the work on mussel byssal thread healing was funded by the DFG priority program 1568 on “Design and Generic Principles of Self-Healing Materials” (HA6369/1-1 and HA6369/1-2). Financial support from the DFG for research within the Cluster of Excellence: “Image Knowledge Gestaltung: An Interdisciplinary Laboratory” is acknowledged. Several of the projects on self-repair mechanisms in plants were funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research in the frameworks of the funding programme BIONA (project ‘Self-healing polymers “OSIRIS”’) and of the Ideenwettbewerb “Bionik – Innovationen aus der Natur” (FKZ0313778A, together with Empa Dübendorf). Two other projects on self-repair mechanisms in plants are part of the European Marie Curie Initial Training Network “Self-Healing Materials: from Concepts to Market” (SHeMat).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomaterials, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam, 14424, Germany

    Matthew J. Harrington & Richard Weinkamer

  2. Plant Biomechanics Group Freiburg, Botanic Garden, Faculty of Biology, University of Freiburg and Freiburg Materials Research Center (FMF), Freiburg, 79104, Germany

    Olga Speck & Thomas Speck

  3. Institute for Botany, Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, 01602, Germany

    Sarah Wagner

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  1. Matthew J. Harrington
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  2. Olga Speck
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  3. Thomas Speck
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  4. Sarah Wagner
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  5. Richard Weinkamer
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Correspondence to Matthew J. Harrington .

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  1. Laboratory for Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry (IOMC) & Jena Center for Soft Matter (JCSM), Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany

    Martin D. Hager

  2. Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft University of Technology , Delft, The Netherlands

    Sybrand van der Zwaag

  3. Laboratory for Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry (IOMC) & Jena Center for Soft Matter (JCSM), Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany

    Ulrich S. Schubert

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Harrington, M.J., Speck, O., Speck, T., Wagner, S., Weinkamer, R. (2015). Biological Archetypes for Self-Healing Materials. In: Hager, M., van der Zwaag, S., Schubert, U. (eds) Self-healing Materials. Advances in Polymer Science, vol 273. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/12_2015_334

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