Still paying for broken smartphone display? Now, it may no longer be an issue to worry about. Researchers have developed a smartphone display material that can self-heal from damages.

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) announced that the collaborative research team led by Dr Yong-Chae Jung and Hak-soo Han from Yonsei University was able to develop a self-healing colourless electronic material that can self-repair cracks or damaged functions occurred on the material.

Colourless polyimide (CPI) has outstanding mechanical, electrical and chemical properties. It features transparency like glass along with strong tensile strength and does not encounter scratches even after folding hundreds of thousands of times.

Thus, it is widely commercialised and used in mobile products such as foldable and flexible displays and is also popularly used throughout the overall industry such as aerospace and PV cells.

As such, since CPI is a material widely used in various industries, constant efforts are made to secure durability by addressing cracks that can occur from various exposure environments and breakages caused by continuous electromagnetic waves.

While several research teams attempted to address these issues by adding additives or coating a hard-protective layer on the surface, they were unable to successfully prevent damages to the underlying materials, the study, published in the journal Composite Part B: Engineering, reported.

In order to support quick self-healing from cracks and damaged functions while maintaining the benefits of colourless polyimide, the research team developed a self-healing colourless polyimide by utilizing linseed oil extracted from seeds of the flax plant.

They fabricated linseed oil-loaded microcapsules; then, created upper-healing layers by mixing the fabricated microcapsules with silicone and coating them on colourless polyimides.

In the material developed by the team, the microcapsules break when mechanical damage occurs, then, the linseed oil leaks out and flows to the damaged area to become hardened, thereby healing the damaged area.

Such self-healing capability has the advantage of being able to heal locally for local damages.

Other materials with self-repairing capabilities developed so far could only be implemented with soft materials and repaired only by applying high-temperature heat to the materials.

On the other hand, the material developed through this research is capable of self-healing even though it is implemented with a hard material, and it can be self-healed at room temperature without requiring high-temperature heat.

Additionally, it offers the advantage of accelerating the healing process by reacting with humidity and UV, in turn, over 95 per cent damage recovery has been achieved within a short time of just 20 minutes.