Self-Healing Concrete
When the
winter comes around, salt trucks line the streets of New York in road salt in
the hopes of preventing the streets from freezing over. Civilians do the same with
the sidewalk, sprinkling it in salt. The effect of salt along with the
expanding due to heat and contracting due to cold has for years forced New York
streets and sidewalks to be repaved, causing a huge dent in the budget of New
York’s tax money. However a recent technology may change that in a few years,
self-healing concrete.
Although
the technology is in its early stages at the moment, only able to heal small
cracks the technology will improve with time and possibly be applied to street
tar, and other various materials. This self-healing concrete mixes biology with
conventional civil engineering. The concrete works by imbuing traditional concrete
with capsules full of dormant bacteria and capsules full of the bacteria’s food.
When the concrete cracks, the capsules break, waking up the dormant bacteria
with the food source and the bacteria, happens to produce limestone with their
waste and will be able to fill in the cracks of concrete. This is an amazing
technology that can revolutionize the Civil Engineering field and may one day
become the norm in construction so concrete repairs will not have to be
constantly be made on sidewalks or buildings.
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