Today's KNOWLEDGE Share : New self-healing smart plastic that is stronger than steel

 Today's KNOWLEDGE Share

New self-healing smart plastic that is stronger than steel

The breakthrough funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and published in Macromolecules and the Journal of Composite Materials was led by Dr. Mohammad Naraghi, director of the Nanostructured Materials Lab and professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M, in close collaboration with Dr. Andreas Polycarpou at The University of Tulsa.

Their work explored the mechanical integrity, shape-recovery and self-healing properties of an advanced carbon-fiber plastic composite called Aromatic Thermosetting Copolyester (ATSP)

Healing Damage On Demand

ATSP opens new frontiers in industries where performance and reliability are critical, and failure isn’t an option.

“In aerospace applications, materials face extreme stress and high temperatures,” Naraghi said. “If any of these elements damage any part of an airplane and disrupt one of their main applications, then you could perform on-demand self-healing.

As ATSP matures and scales, it holds the potential to transform commercial and consumer industries, particularly the automotive sector. 

“Because of the bond exchanges that take place in the material, you can restore a car’s deformations after a collision, and most importantly, significantly improve vehicle safety by protecting the passenger,” Naraghi said.

ATSP is also a more sustainable alternative to traditional plastics. Its recyclability makes the material an ideal candidate for industries aiming to reduce environmental waste without compromising durability or strength.

“These vitrimers, when reinforced with discontinuous fibers, can undergo level cycling — you can easily crush and mold it into a new shape, and this can happen across many, many cycles, and the chemistry of the material basically doesn’t degrade.

Uncovering ATSP’s Capabilities

“ATSPs are an emerging class of vitrimers that combine the best features of traditional plastics,” Naraghi said.  “They offer the flexibility of thermoplastics, with the chemical and structural stability of thermosets. So, when combined with strong carbon fibers, you get a material that is several times stronger than steel, yet lighter than aluminum.

What sets ATSP apart from traditional plastics is its self-healing and shape-recovery capabilities.

“Shape recovery and self-healing are two facets of the same mechanism,” Naraghi explained. “With shape recovery, it refers to the bond exchange within a continuous piece of material — a kind of built-in ‘intelligence.’ And, in self-healing, there’s discontinuity in the material like a crack. These are the properties we investigated.

To investigate its properties, the researchers used a novel stress-test called cyclical creep testing.

“We applied repeated cycles of tensile, or stretching, loads to our samples, monitoring changes in how the material accumulated, stored and released strain energy.

Using cyclical loading, the researchers identified two critical temperatures within the material.

“The first is the glass transition temperature, or the temperature at which the polymer chains can move around easily, and the second is the vitrification temperature. That’s the temperature at which these bonds are thermally activated enough that you can see massive bond exchanges to cause healing, reshaping and recovery.

The team then conducted deep-cycle bending fatigue tests, periodically heating the material to around 160 degrees Celsius to trigger self-healing.

Their results showed that the ATSP samples not only endured hundreds of stress and heating cycles without failure, but that they actually grew more durable during the healing process.

“Much like skin can stretch, heal and return to its original shape, the material deformed, healed and ‘remembered’ its original shape, becoming more durable than when it was originally made,” Naraghi said.

Crack, Heal, Repeat

Naraghi and his team put the heat-resistant ATSP through five grueling stress cycles, each followed by high temperature exposure at 280 degrees Celsius.

The goal? To assess the material’s performance and self-healing properties.

After two full damage-healing cycles, the material returned to nearly full strength. By the fifth cycle, healing efficiency dropped to about 80% because of mechanical fatigue.

“Using high-resolution imaging, we observed that the composite after damage and healing was similar to the original design, though repeated damage caused some localized mechanical wear attributed to manufacturing defects.

Still, the material’s chemical stability and self-healing behaviors remained reliable across all five cycles.

“We also observed that there was no thermal degradation or breakdown in the material, demonstrating its durability even after damage and healing.

Powering Innovation Through Strategic Partnerships

Naraghi’s work, sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and in collaboration with ATSP Innovations, underscores Texas A&M’s commitment of driving technological innovations into revolutionary capabilities that advance U.S. defense and industry priorities.

“Our partnerships are very important,” Naraghi said. “In addition to supporting us financially, the program managers at AFOSR collaborate with us and offer valuable guidance on questions that could have been overlooked. Our close collaboration with ATSP Innovations has also proven to be very fruitful and very important.”

The research team’s breakthrough represents more than an emerging class of materials; it’s a blueprint for how bold science and strategic partnerships can redefine a future where plastics don’t just endure, they evolve and adapt.

“My students and post-docs do the heavy lifting — I cannot thank them enough,” Naraghi added. “It’s through trial and error, collaborations and partnerships that we turn exciting curiosity into impactful applications.

source: Texas A&M University

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share : What Is Going Wrong in UK Plastics Recycling?

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share

What Is Going Wrong in UK Plastics Recycling?

Biffa shut its Sunderland plant.

Viridor walked away from Avonmouth and Rochester.

Yes Recycling Fife collapsed within a year.

All three were backed by major investments

All three had buyers lined up for recyclate

All three are now offline

This is not bad luck

It is bad structure

Over the next four posts I will break down:

1. Why cheap virgin imports are undercutting UK recyclers

2. How weak policy enforcement is fuelling market failure

3. What volatile PRNs and cheap exports are doing to infrastructure

4. Why demand from brands is softer than their promises

Let’s start with the first:

**Cheap Virgin Resin = Broken Economics**

Virgin PE, PP, and PET have been flooding the global market.

New capacity in Asia and the US has driven prices down 30 to 40 percent.

Meanwhile, recycled plastic costs more to produce in the UK than it can sell for.

We are asking UK recyclers to compete with materials made in places with

– lower power costs

– fewer labour protections

– zero environmental standards

The result? You lose money on every tonne.

You shut down. You leave the market.

source: Stuart McCaig

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share : Getting sticky: the highest rerforming underwater adhesive hydrogel polymer

Inspired by biology, researchers have achieved the highest performing underwater adhesive hydrogel technology to date through a data mining and machine learning approach.

Hydrogels are a permeable soft material consisting of polymer networks and water with applications ranging from bio-medical engineering to contact lenses. Intrinsic to hydrogels is the ability to endow diverse characteristics by modifying their polymer networks. Professor Gong’s research lab at WPI-ICReDD, Hokkaido University, specializes in hydrogel technology and has engineered hydrogels with self-strengthening, self-healing, underwater adhesion properties and more. For adhesive hydrogels, achieving instant, strong, and repeatable underwater adhesion is a prevailing challenge.

Through a combination of data mining and machine learning, Professor Gong, Professor Takigawa, Professor Fan, graduate student Liao, and colleagues have recently developed the strongest underwater-adhesive hydrogels to date with adhesive strengths (Fa) exceeding 1 MPa. The gels’ strength was both instant and repeatable and they are functional across various surfaces under variable levels of salinity from pure water to seawater. This research was published in Nature and was selected for the cover.

For reference, if these hydrogels were cut to the size of a single postage stamp (2.5 x 2.5 cm), they could theoretically support ~63 kg (e.g. an adult human). The researchers demonstrated the hydrogel’s adhesive strength by applying it to a rubber duck on a seaside rock where it withstood repeated ocean tides and wave impacts.

Taking inspiration from biology, these hydrogels were designed with polymer networks derived from adhesive proteins found in archaea, bacteria, eukaryotes, and viruses. Despite the diversity across these organisms, these proteins share common sequence patterns that endow adhesion in wet environments. For this, ~25,000 adhesive protein datasets, collected from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) protein database, were data mined for relevant amino acid sequences important for underwater adhesion.

They replicated these sequences into polymer networks and synthesized 180 hydrogels—each containing unique polymer networks. The data compiled from studying these hydrogels were analyzed with machine learning which further extrapolated the most significant polymer sequences. The original 180 gels synthesized from data mining demonstrated adhesive qualities greater than gels previously reported in the literature. However, the gels inspired by machine learning were more incredible, exceeding the highly desired qualities mentioned above.

Repeatable and instant adhesion are highly desired qualities for applications ranging from biomedical engineering and deep-sea exploration. These qualities are confirmed in an experiment in which the water leak from a damaged pipe could be covered instantly and repeatedly.

The significance of the data driven approach in this research is clearly highlighted upon comparison of these hydrogels with previous conventional models. Such a distinct advancement in overall performance should lead to exciting new discoveries and applications for adhesive hydrogel applications.

source: Hokkaido University

DataLase launches functional masterbatch additive for plastics integration

DataLase has launched its ‘Masterbatch Additive’ – a functional additive designed for integration into plastic products and packaging, for laser coding and marking purposes.

DataLase, the global leader in Photonic Printing Solutions, has developed a functional masterbatch additive suitable for a wide range of plastics, including home and personal care, pharmaceutical, medical, electronic, automotive, agricultural and industrial extruded products.

By addressing the challenges faced by production and manufacturing companies with product coding applications, such as printing expiry dates and lot numbers, DataLase Masterbatch Additive has been optimised specifically for extrusion and injection plastic moulding to provide unsurpassed product stability and excellent quality.

Launched as a DataLase VAReLase® Pigment Solutions initiative, the additive is integrated directly into the masterbatch in pellet form, to provide consistent high quality, high contrast, permanent black coding. When compared to other coding methods, the masterbatch additive works with standard CO? scribing lasers to provide sustainability benefits in production environments by eliminating labels, consumables and waste from the coding and marking process. It can also help streamline supply chains through a reduction in packaging.

With lasers retrofitted to assembly lines, the additive will also deliver a range of efficiency benefits. By having the flexibility to make fast changes to coding and decoration requirements, the coding and marking process can reduce unscheduled downtime, requires minimal preventive maintenance and less frequent fume extraction filter changes. Additionally, as the additive is already integrated into the extruded plastic, manufacturers will be able to enhance brand integrity by providing SKU traceability through permanent coding that is tamper proof, anti-counterfeit and impossible to remove. The additive can also assist in improving packaging design by removing unsightly ablation areas; furthermore, it can be printed anywhere on the packaging with high precision.

Commenting on the launch, DataLase’s CTO, Ally Grant, said: “In light of the ongoing pandemic, the importance of supply chain resilience and risk management are more apparent than ever. Key to implementing refinements will be developments in technology and sustainability. Our masterbatch additive initiative ticks all the boxes in providing manufacturing and production environments with clear efficiency and environmental benefits, thereby assisting them to be prepared for future unexpected risk events and situations.

source : DataLase

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share : Balsam-Pear-Skin-Like-Structure Polyvinylidene Fluoride/Ethylene–Vinyl Alcohol Fibrous Membrane

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share

Balsam-Pear-Skin-Like-Structure Polyvinylidene Fluoride/Ethylene–Vinyl Alcohol Fibrous Membrane for Highly Efficient Oil/Water Separation Through One-Step Electrospinning

Rapid growth of industrial activities has significantly increased oil demand, leading to wastewater contamination with oil and causing severe environmental pollution. Traditional oil–water separation techniques, such as gravity separation, filtration, and chemical treatments, are hindered by low efficiency, high energy consumption, and secondary pollution. Membrane separation technology has emerged as a promising solution due to its simplicity, low energy consumption, and high efficiency. In this study, we report the fabrication of a novel polyvinylidene fluoride/ethylene–vinyl alcohol (#PVDF/#EVOH) #nanofibrousmembrane (NFM) with a unique balsam-pear-skin-like structure using a one-step #electrospinningprocess. The membrane’s superhydrophobicity and superoleophilicity were achieved via water vapor-induced phase separation (WVIPS), by optimizing the rheological properties and mixing ratio of EVOH and PVDF precursor solutions. The resulting PVDF/EVOH (PE12-3) NFM exhibits exceptional properties, achieving separation efficiencies of 99.4% for heavy oil and 98.9% for light oil, with a heavy oil flux of 18,020 L m−2 h−1—significantly surpassing previously reported performances. Additionally, the membrane shows excellent recyclability, making it ideal for large-scale oil–water separation in wastewater treatment and environmental remediation. This one-step fabrication strategy offers an efficient and scalable approach for developing high-performance membranes to tackle #oilpollution in water.

Read the paper here: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/17/10/1389

source: Wuyi University

Arkema invests in castor farming to secure bio-based feedstock for low-carbon materials in India

Arkema announces the creation of the Castor Farmer Education Fund (CFEF), a collaborative initiative designed to support castor farming communities in India. 

The CFEF aims to raise funds to further accelerate the adoption of innovative and resilient farming techniques across the region by empowering farmers through education and training, generating lasting environmental and social impact.

Integrating castor-based feedstocks into low-carbon materials

Castor is the renewable feedstock used in the production of Rilsan® PA11 and Oleris® advanced Oleochemicals.

 

The fund will support projects that improve livelihoods, encourage regenerative agriculture, and foster long-term environmental stewardship in castor-growing regions. Open to all stakeholders, customers, brands, and partners across the castor value chain, the fund offers a unique opportunity to take meaningful, collective action. Together, contributors will help scale up farmer education programs, with the ambition of training 100,000 to 150,000 farmers by 2030.

 

“This fund represents a strong commitment to the people and communities who play a key role in the castor value chain. While it aligns with Arkema’s CSR roadmap, it also reflects the spirit of our global sponsorship strategy, which promotes inclusion, diversity, and education. This initiative will significantly strengthen the sustainability performance of the entire castor oil industry” commented Emmanuelle Bromet, VP, Sustainable Development.

The Fund will leverage on the expertise of strong and reliable partners

Arkema will serve as an anchor donor and intends to remain actively involved throughout the initiative. A dedicated Steering Committee will guide the fund’s strategic direction and partner TTFA and Solidaridad in selecting and executing impactful projects.

 

TT Foundation Advisors (TTFA) will administrate the fund to ensure transparency and impact, as well as provide advisory services, donor stewardship and management of the fund. TTFA is the philanthropy advisory arm of Temasek Trust, the philanthropic branch of Singapore-headquartered global investment company Temasek. It provides specialized advisory and management services to philanthropic foundations, family offices, business corporations, philanthropists, and charities.

 

Solidaridad will be the initial guarantee and will oversee training, monitoring, and project sourcing to ensure consistent and high-quality implementation. Solidaridad is an international civil society organization with a strong 55-year track record of supporting farming communities to become more resilient and is a long-standing partner of Arkema in building a more sustainable castor value chain.

 

“With the adoption of sustainability principles, small-scale farmers are able to improve income as well as soil health and biodiversity. With Arkema, this initiative can be scaled in castor-growing regions to build long-term resilience among the farming community,” said Shatadru Chattopadhyay, managing director, Solidaridad Asia.

 

“The Castor Farmer Education Fund reflects a shared commitment to empower farming communities and strengthen sustainable agricultural practices. TT Foundation Advisors is honoured to partner with Arkema and Solidaridad to provide a trusted, transparent platform that enables all stakeholders to collaborate and achieve better outcomes for the castor value chain,” said Dickson Lim, head, TT Foundation Advisors

Arkema’s long-standing presence in the region

Arkema has been a committed supporter of local farming communities through initiatives such as the Pragati Program which trained over 10,000 farmers since 2016 and demonstrated 57% higher yields and 33% lower water consumption among participating farmers. As a founding member of the Sustainable Castor Association, 

 

Arkema also helped develop the SuCCESS Sustainable Castor Farming Code, a benchmark for responsible castor cultivation. Castor is a crop with a favorable sustainability profile: it does not compete with food crops, does not contribute to deforestation, and carries a low risk of unfair labor practices.

source : Arkema / SpecialChem