Smart clothing seems like a great concept but the feasibility of wearing around delicate “printed” electronics has been a major issues since the idea’s inception.<\/p>\n
Essentially, the tiniest tear in smart clothing can render it useless so engineers from the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego set out to solve this issue.<\/p>\n
The team of engineers have created a self-healing magnetic ink capable of repairing multiple cuts in as quickly as 50 milliseconds.<\/p>\n
By continuing to develop the magnetic ink technology, the researchers hope it could eventually be used for batteries or electrochemical sensors, or even self-healing devices such as wearable electronic circuits that fix themselves.<\/p>\n
In order to create the magnetic ink, the engineers crushed up copious amounts of neodymium permanent magnets into microscopic particles.<\/p>\n
From there, the miniature magnets were inserted into ink to make printed electronics, along with carbon powder to help increase conductivity.<\/p>\n
The ink is then exposed to a magnetic field, which aligns the particles, ultimately allowing the magnetic ink to heal a cut since the two sides are attracted to each other.<\/p>\n
At the moment the UC San Diego team says the technology is capable of repairing tears as wide as 3 mm, “a record in the field of self-healing systems.”<\/p>\n