Headline December 25, 2016/ ''' SOME -*GLUE*- SPACE : !WOW! "'

''' SOME -*GLUE*- SPACE : !WOW! "'

SAM DAILY TIMES  -*The Voice Of The Voiceless*- wishes its every single reader. in the entire Universe,  *A Very Merry Christmas*-

And every prayer, for a prosperous, peaceful, hardworking -and- a  mankind-serving  new Year!  In turn, !WOW!    -the World Students Society joins the honour of wishing the same to the whole of mankind.

*!WOW! Becalmed!  Fasting acting materials*  can seal holes and holes in  just about every emergency.

Bullets fired on an aircraft are bad news. A single shot through the  pressurized fuselage at altitude can cause oxygen to in seconds in a whoosh.

Gunfights may not be a  problem on spacecraft, but they do need to be able to cope with with a high-speed impact from a space debris.

Engineering together hulls are is one way to reduce the risks, but another is to use materials that can rapidly heal themselves. A team of chemical engineers think they have come up with just the stuff.

In looking for material that would spontaneously  self-repair, Timothy Scott of the  University of Michigan and his colleagues wanted to try a liquid resin which could be stored between two solid sheets.

If the sheets are penetrated, the idea is that the resin oozes out and solidifies, blocking the hole. Materials capable of doing this already exist.

Some use microcapsules containing a  glue-like  chemical, which spreads if the capsule are required when the in which they are embedded is damaged by another chemical such as a catalyst, which has been mixed into the main material.

The problem with such process is that they can take hours to set. That may be fine for some applications, like a  self-healing  coating on pipework. But in an aircraft or in spacecraft a hole needs plugging instantly.

The group began looking for a compounds that would rapidly solidify when exposed to chemicals commonly found in the air that people breathe.

Dr. Scott reasoned that if an aircraft's fuselage or spacecraft is punctured, there would be an enormous amount of breathable air suddenly vacating the vessel.

!WOW! to Radical ideas, then.

Compounds that react to water-vapor in air were dismissed: much of the air found in aircraft and spacecraft is deliberately kept rather dry in  in order to help prevent corrosion, and is thus unlikely to enough moisture to cause a self-healing reaction.

Carbon dioxide and nitrogen are poor at setting off the necessary chemical transformation.

The favourite candidate was a group of chemicals known as alkylboranes, which are used in various industrial applications and react vigorously with oxygen to generate highly reactive class of chemicals known as free radicals.

These free radicals are widely used to initiate polymerization, the process of joining together many small molecules into longer ones to create plastics.

However, working alkyboranes was not easy because their free radicals react with oxygen in such a way that they can also shut polymerization down, and that is what the researchers wanted to happen.

To get around this problem, Dr. Scott created an alternative liquid resin made of  organosulphuric compounds, known as  thiols  and, hydrocarbons called  alkenes.

The free radicals formed by this combination will react to oxygen, but they retain an affinity for driving polymerization along.

To test this idea out, Dr. Scott and his team used the combination within a one millimetre space contained between two hard layers of plastic materials, each of which was also one millimetre thick.

The researchers then clamped this sandwich into position and shot it with a rifle at point blank range.

Sure enough, they found that the formulation rapidly transformed into durable polymer plug in the bullet hole...!WOW!

Moreover, as they report in  ACS Macro Letters, high speed video revealed that   -that the sold plug formed is under a second, faster that any similar self-healing materials yet developed.....!WOW!

With respectful dedication to all the Students, Professors, Teachers of the World. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and Twitter-........!E-WOW! ....the Ecosystem 2011:


''' *Masters in the Universe*  '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless