Healing rust

PhD student Huang Mingxing (left) and Assistant Professor Yang Jinglei examining the successful experiment steel plates that proved that their anti-corrosion technology was successful in preventing rust from forming in scratched areas of metal. PHOTO: NTU

IT ALL started with a simple scratch to his car, that ended up costing him hundreds of dollars in repairs due to rusting.

The incident sparked Assistant Professor Yang Jinglei, from Nanyang Technological University's (NTU) School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, a desire to research on a self-healing anti-rust technology, and he started a research team on it.

And the result of all thinking and research is the development of a type of microcapsule that, when mixed into paint, can prevent rust.

And when layered behind a gloss of paint, it can even act as a "self-healing" agent to react with and repair the rust.