May 2019 archive

Self healing shoes may be in your future!

By : Shariqua Ahmed

 

 

Date: 5/14/19

 

 

News Type: World

 

Summary:

You may have shoes that have worn out soles and have no use anymore, but what if they could just be fixed by themselves! Impossible right? maybe not anymore. When people throw out shoes they do not think so far  as to question the cons of doing so. It’s very harmful to our environment. According to the U.S. Department of the Interior, 300 million pairs of shoes end up in landfills each year, where they can take 30 to 40 years to decompose. Now we have a self-healing 3-D printed rubber material. The polymer is what was thought up by researchers at the University of Southern California’s  Viterbi School of Engineering and the University of Connecticut . The team, led by USC Assistant Professor Qiming Wang and UConn Assistant Professor Ying Li, created it through a process called photopolymerization. which uses light to solidify the liquid resin used to create 3-D printed plastic. The researchers found that adding the right amount of oxidizer to the liquid resin allowed the 3-D polymer to heal without slowing down the hardening process.Using the technique, the researchers were able to 3-D print a 17.5-millimeter square in just 5 seconds and entire objects in only about 20 minutes!The team, who published their findings in the journal NPG Asia Materials on February 1, 2019state that the repair time can be reduced by increasing the room temperature. “If you just put a broken shoe on a bench at room temperature, the rubber will heal itself in six to eight hours,” Wang said. With all this all we need is a automatic cleaner to get all the stains off and life will be perfect!

 

Personal response:

I choose this article because I think it would be cool to have shoes that I never had to throw out!