Improved metrics for assessment of immortal materials and products

An emergent vision for industrial sustainability is moving beyond the circular economy into the possibility of “immortal” products. This requires development of methods to enable the reliable and scalable production of novel products and systems that possess the inherent ability to sense and repair damage enabling in service healing and immortality. In the literature, this is mostly described by the self-healing property of the materials (polymers, metals, composites, ceramics and bio and non-bio hybrid systems). Self-healing systems are generally classified according to material type and self-repairing autonomy. This paper presents a brief review of existing immortal products and current methods of assessment. The paper presents an amalgamation of published research in the form of new process windows for the selection of self-heling materials and systems. Another contribution is made by the development of new metrics for assessing self-healing capability, with a vision to produce healing metrics that incorporate technical performance, as well as social, environmental and economic impact.