Speaker 0:  imagine a wind turbine or a deep space okay. i'll start again. imagine a wind turbine or a deep space probe that fixes its own structural cracks without a single human lifting a finger. north carolina state university research just built a self healing material that repairs itself over a thousand times, pushing mechanical lifespans to an unbelievable five hundred years. so self healing materials, last five hundred years now. the scientists have engineered a fiber reinforced polymer, an frp, that uses an embedded carbon layer to electrically heat and melt an internal plastic layer, sealing internal structural splits in real time. this effectively eliminates delamination, the hidden internal cracking that dooms aircraft infrastructure and green tech. this completely rewrites the economics of heavy industry by turning high maintenance, fragile hardware into essentially immoral structures. what do you think about this, john?

Speaker 1:  yeah. i like how you have, terminator tech because this is kind of interesting and scary. so most people, and so do i, i think or thought machines fail because of major accidents, but most of the time, they fail because of structural failures, because of fatigue. and so fatigue happens when materials experience millions or billions of tiny stress cycles. so, airplane wings flex during every flight. right? wind turbines bend continuously. bridges vibrate under traffic. cars experience constant road vibrations. each of those cycles creates microscopic cracks. and so, initially, these cracks are invisible. but over time, they grow larger until catastrophic failure occurs. and engineers, they spend enormous amounts of time and money inspecting structures, specifically because fatigue damage is unavoidable in conventional materials. so fiber reinforced polymer polymers, what they do is they combine high strength fibers like carbon fiber, glass fiber, aramid, and polymer matrix materials like epoxies and resins. and so the fibers provide strength. the polymer matrix transfers load between fibers. and so this combination produces materials with exceptional strength to weight ratios, corrosion resistance, and design flexibility. and so, actually, modern aircraft such as, like, the boeing seven eighty seven dreamliner and airbus a three fifty, they already rely heavily on composite structures. so the weakness is that once matrix cracking begins, damage accumulates permanently. and so this new material, what it does is it incorporates reversible chemical bonds within the polymer matrix. so unlike conventional polymers that permanently fracture when molecular bonds break, these specialized polymers can reform bonds after damage occurs. so it's like molecular velcro, i guess. so under stress, bonds separate, energy absorb, crack formation begins. but once the stress is removed, the bonds reconnect, the material properties recover, and crack propagation slows or stops, which is crazy. and this differs from older self healing materials that relied on more one time use micro capsules filled with repair agents because those systems only worked once. so this new approach, it's repeatable. it allows multiple healing cycles throughout the material's lifetime. this is cool. i think this is great. this is i'm excited to see, this being implemented into our everyday use items. right? what are your thoughts?

Speaker 0:  yeah. i like to think of this update like building a microscopic hot glue gun directly into a piece of heavy duty cardboard. normally, if you bend the cardboard, the internal layer split apart, and it's ruined forever. but with this new tech, the moment a microscopic rip happens, a tiny built in wire goes off quickly, gives off a quick zap of heat, melting a layer of internal plastic glue right in the wound to seal it perfectly before the structure can snap. this technology is officially patented, and the commercialization is going through their spin off company structure yx structure yx inc. they operate as a b to b industrial licensing model, so you can take a look at that. and right now, this highly adaptable framework is designed for wind turbine blades, commercial aviation win wings, military hardware, and deep space exploration probes. so we probably won't be seeing it in the consumer market, anytime soon.

Speaker 1:  no. and the thing is is, like, this headline that we're seeing, it might sound sensational, but there's some real engineering logic behind it. so, like, i don't, like, we cover a lot that could potentially never make it to market, but i think that this is one of those that, could definitely, we could definitely see very, very soon.

Speaker 0:  yeah. it's coming to market now. yeah. and, this company is distributing it. so you take a look at that. the number of auto automated fracture and heal cycles completed sexually successfully during the intensive four day laboratory testing was, over a thousand. and two times the four time increased baseline resistance to delamination compared to conventional, fiber reinforcement polymers, and a 175% is the initial post heal performance rating relative to standard composite fracture resistance, which stabilize well above 60% even after extreme, cycle fatigue. so this is really interesting. this is the most, significant leap forward in autonomous materials since the advent of self healing concrete. we talked about that in a previous, episode way way back. it marks a paradigm shift from passive, sacrificial material engineering to active dynamic structural recovery, fundamentally challenging the traditional limitations of an x 80 x x equivalent passive materials in aerospace design. so this is not a passive miracle material. it requires an active electrical subsystem to trigger the heating, mechanism. if the internal carbon wiring is severed during a catastrophic impact or if power routing fails, a composite material behaves exactly like standard vulnerable plastics. scaling three d printing plastic interlayers uniformly across a 100 meter commercial wind turbine blade remains a massive manufacturing bottleneck. so we are officially leaving the area of wear and tear and entering a world of immortal machines. if you could build one everyday item out of this self healing composite so it would never break again, what would it be? let us know in the chat. we'd love to hear from you.