A new environmentally-friendly paint identifies dangerous defects before they cost lives
Could a simple coat of paint save lives??Researchers at the?University of Strathcylde in Glasgow, Scotland believe so: They've developed a smart paint capable of finding structural defects and the?potential for disaster long before any issues arise.
The?environmentally-friendly paint consists of aligned nanofiber tubes and a recycled byproduct of burning coal. It's not especially?pretty, but that's not the point.?When applied, the paint looks and acts more like a layer of cement than a layer of paint, allowing it to withstand weather.
Should something happen to threaten the stability of the structure the paint is applied to ? say a microcrack forms in a support beam ? the nanofiber tubes in the paint will bend. Because the conductivity of nanofiber tubes change when they bend, the defect can be found remotely using wireless nodes designed to detect changes in current.
Structure collapses do not happen with great frequency, but the consequences of a collapse can be devastating. One person was killed when a?Big Dig ceiling panel fell on a car in Boston in 2006. And in the following year, 13?people were killed and 145 were injured in 2007 when a?bridge spanning the Mississippi River collapsed in Minnesota.
(via?Cnet)
This article was written by Fox Van Allen and originally appeared on Tecca
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