Graphene could hold the key to developing an artificial skin for robots.
Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology believe that the nanomaterial could lead to the development of flexible sensors that mimic the self-healing properties of human skin.
Graphene—which is about one million times thinner than paper—is a sheet of pure carbon atoms and is currently the world’s strongest material.
Skin is the largest organ in the human body and is known for its self-healing properties. Due to unprecedented stretching or bending and incidental scratches, artificial skin used in robots is susceptible to ruptures and fissures.
The researchers used a sub-nano sensor that uses graphene to sense a crack as soon as it starts nucleation and even after the crack has spread a certain distance.
“We wanted to observe the self-healing behavior of both pristine and defected single layer graphene and its application in sub-nano sensors for crack spotting by using molecular dynamic simulation,” Swati Ghosh Acharyya, Ph.D., the main author of the article, said in a statement. “We were able to document the self-healing of cracks in graphene without the presence of any external stimulus and at room temperature.”
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