A cracked piece of metal self-healed during an experiment and stunned scientists

In the study, a team from Sandia National Laboratories and Texas A&M University (USA) tested the stability of the metal. To do this, they used a specialized transmission electron microscope to pull the ends of the metal 200 times every second.

During the experiment, scientists observed the healing of the metal itself. If this process can be fully understood and controlled, it will be the beginning of a completely new era of engineering, ScienceAlert writes.

Scientists observed self-healing on an ultra-small scale in a 40-nanometer-thick piece of platinum suspended in a vacuum.

Cracks caused by the type of deformation described above are known as fatigue damage: repeated loads and movements cause microscopic tears that eventually lead to the destruction of machines or structures.

Surprisingly, after about 40 minutes of observation, the crack in the platinum began to grow together and repair itself, and then move in the other direction again.

"It was just amazing to watch. We were definitely not looking for this. We've confirmed that metals have their own intrinsic natural ability to repair themselves, at least in the case of fatigue damage at the nanoscale," said materials researcher Brad Boyce of Sandia National Laboratories when the results were announced.

Scientists explain that they do not know exactly how this happens or how it can be used in the future. However, when you think about the costs and effort required to repair everything from bridges to engines to phones, it's hard to imagine how much self-healing metals could change.

While the observation is unprecedented, it is not entirely unexpected. In 2013, materials scientist Michael Demkovich of Texas A&M University worked on a study that suggested that this kind of nanocrack healing could occur because tiny crystal grains within metals actually shift their boundaries in response to stress. He also worked on this study using updated computer models to show that his theories from a decade ago about metal self-healing at the nanoscale are consistent with what is happening here.

The fact that the automatic repair process occurred at room temperature is another promising aspect of the study. Normally, metal requires a lot of heat to change its shape, but the experiment was conducted in a vacuum, so it is not known whether the same process would occur with ordinary metal in a typical environment.

A possible explanation is a process known as cold welding, which occurs at ambient temperatures whenever metal surfaces come close enough to each other for their respective atoms to join. Typically, the process is hindered by thin layers of air or contaminants. In environments such as space vacuum, pure metals can be pressed close enough together to literally stick together.

"I hope this finding will encourage materials researchers to think about the fact that under the right circumstances, materials can do things we never expected," Demkovic said.

Earlier, OBOZ.UA reported that physicists have found evidence of the existence of "negative time." Scientists believe that these results emphasize a special quirk of quantum mechanics, rather than radical changes in our understanding of time.

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