Smartphone and tablet screens can be very easy to break and painfully expensive to replace.
Here's some good news,... Korean researchers have developed a display material that can mend itself when broken.
Here's Park Se-young with the details.
This luminous element is used to make displays for electronic devices.
When connected to an electrode, it emits bright light.
The element emits brighter light with increased voltage, but it soon becomes damaged and parts of it turn black.
But when the power is switched off, the black patches disappear and the element's luminous properties are restored.
"The display became damaged from a current leakage. Through experiments, we found that the damaged display made a one-hundred-percent recovery of its original performance …after about a minute of self-healing."
The self-healing luminous element developed by Korean researchers is high in viscosity and elasticity.
When the material is cut in two, it starts to repair itself in about three minutes.
After 30 minutes, the two pieces have become one and the element's luminous properties fully recover.
The researchers plan to use this element to develop displays for wearable devices.
"Wearable displays have to be very flexible, and since the human body makes a lot of movements, the display should be easily restored when damaged."
However, screens made from the self-healing luminous element use ten times more energy than ordinary screens.
The researchers plan to raise the efficiency of the element before its commercialization, …and extend the battery life of devices with flexible displays.
Park Se-young, Arirang News.
