Self-healing polymers: extending their lifetime

Materials scientists have always focused on the design of materials which are robust and resistant to mechanical and chemical damage. The strategy has worked very well over the past years and has served to develop very strong materials. However, these materials can still fail and once damage occurs it will not disappear, limiting their service life. Inspired by nature, self-healing materials are here to overcome this limitation. Materials with the ability to heal are capable of making damage disappear in a more or less independent way thereby extending their service life, and thus reducing waste.

In this presentation I will give an overview of some recent developments in the field of self-healing polymeric materials. A more detailed discussion will be presented about a recent development dealing with self-healing natural rubber and the introduction of dielectric spectroscopy to analyze the self-healing state of polymers. 

Short biography

Dr. Hernández received her BSc degree in Materials Engineering from Universidad Simón Bolívar (Caracas, Venezuela) and then obtained a MSc in Macromolecular Physical-Chemistry from the Ecole d´Applications des Hauts Polymères/Université Louis Pasteur (Strasbourg, France). Her professional career started working as a Researcher at INTEVEP, the top level Institute of Research and Technology of the state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (Caracas, Venezuela). Then she held the position of Associate Professor in Materials Engineering at Simón Bolívar University (Caracas, Venezuela); with research lines focused on elastomeric materials. Later on, she joined the Nanocomposites Group at the Institute of Polymer Science and Technology, ICTP-CSIC (Madrid, Spain) as a PhD Student. Her challenge was to study the molecular dynamics of Natural Rubber (NR) nanocomposites with layered silicates and carbon based nanofillers (carbon nanotubes and functionalized graphene sheets). In 2014 she was awarded with a Marie Curie Fellowship to work at the Novel Aerospace Materials Group (TUDelft, The Netherlands) on self-healing elastomers. In 2016 she was awarded with a Research Contract given by the Ministry of Economics of Spain to work as Principal Investigator (PI) at the Institute of Polymer Science and Technology (2017-2020). Her research topic is the development of eco-friendly self-healing compounds with the inclusion of waste rubber. Dr. Hernández has published over 48 ISI articles and 4 book chapters (764 citations; h-factor: 14).