New corrosion protection that repairs itself

Skyscrapers, bridges, ships, aeroplanes, cars - everything humans make or build sooner or later decays. The ravages of time are known as corrosion; nothing is safe from it.

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This makes the fight against corrosion expensive. All countries together invest around 3.5 percent of annual global gross domestic product in corrosion protection, which amounts to some 4,000 billion dollars: a huge market and a gigantic problem.

Researchers at ETH Zurich led by Markus Niederberger and Walter Caseri from the Laboratory for Multifunctional Materials have now presented a new solution. Over the past years, they have developed a plastic that could greatly improve and simplify corrosion protection. Poly (phenylene methylene) is the miracle material's name, or PPM for short.

This new corrosion protection material kills several birds with one stone. When mixed as paint and heated, PPM can be sprayed onto a surface and becomes solid. The polymer indicates holes and cracks in the protective layer by failing to fluoresce.

What's more, it repairs any damage itself without further external intervention. And at the end of a product's life, the polymer can be completely removed and recycled with only minimal material loss.

The recycled polymer can then be applied to another surface with no loss in its special properties and functions. It was pure chance that kicked off this development. About ten years ago, researchers in Niederberger's lab were working on the production of nanoparticles in a special organic solvent.