Self repairing materials and reliability of industrial goods: nature-guided engineering

Abstract

"Repair" is indispensable for man-made machines and apparatuses at their inevitable breakdown. On the other hand, almost all living species, which have been selected through their evolution over a hundred million years, are not taken their lives by deterioration or damages of their parts of the bodies. This paper presents and summarizes: 1) man-made materials which repair them automatically with pseudo-respiration or pseudo-metabolism like them in a living body, 2) the reliability of man-made machine and apparatus composed of the self-repair materials, and 3) the comparison of protection systems in a living body and a man-made functional system as well as the examples of self-repairing materials and the concept of "active protection system" and "passive protection system".