You can now alleviate that all-time fear that you'll break your mother's back by stepping on a crack in the sidewalk; like the human body, it turns out that concrete can heal itself.
"Concrete is like a living body, in that it can self-heal its own small wounds (cracks) as an intrinsic characteristic," stated a press release posted on Newswise. "However, cracks do not heal easily in conventional concrete due to its rather brittle nature, which calls into question the effectiveness of self-healing in conventional concrete materials with no control over crack formation."
(So, yes, it might be jumping the gun to propose that sidewalk cement can heal itself, but it was too good of an intro to pass up.)
Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) - the concrete of the healing kind - is essentially the ideation of material technology first suggested by Dr. Victor Li, a scientist based out of the Civil and Enivronmental Engineering program at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. To create ECC, conventional concrete is altered and imbued with microfibers no wider than the human hair to repair ductile microcracks.
"Having cracks with widths at micrometer levels allows us to add special attributes such as self-healing to ECC material," added Mustafa Sahmaran, a professor from Gazi University in Ankara, Turkey, according to the press statement.
If conventional concrete is swapped out and replaced with ECC for everyday construction use, infrastructure repair can be cut down significantly, which could heavily reduce the amount of time, energy, and money taxpayers pour (no pun intended) into the U.S. national budget. This could significantly mitigate and reroute the focus of our national economy, which has had a longstanding issue with overdue infrastructural repair work: in 2010 alone, the cost of deficiencies in surface transportation systems (i.e., roads, bridges, and such, most made out of concrete) were $130 billion alone, according to a report issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 2011.
In addition to this astronomical number, the ASCE also states that almost $220 billion dollars is needed annually between 2010 and 2040 for repair work, as well as an extra $25 billion for capital transit structure investment, with rolling stock. And this isn't including infrastructural transit like waterways - exclusively surface maintenence.
So yeah, ECC could sort of help out with that - and rendering safe the spinal cords of the women who have birthed us all.
