[Jonty30]

If they can control this, they can join metals together in new and unthought of ways.

[Steely Tom]

So what’s “cold welding?”

[algore]

I think I saw this in an Arnie movie, I can’t remember which one, but I think it had AI too

[Candor7]

Shezam...just slide the panels together, put the jet fighter in a vacuum, add the juice, and weld the whole thing together,using ultra thin alloys of titanium.....

We get to have our own UFOs!

[DannyTN]

You don’t want to use it on just any crack.

Something like that could destroy Uranus.

[smokingfrog]

[Bullish]

Anytime you work metal you’re creating friction and friction causes heat. I imagine stretching a thin piece of metal 200 times a second would create plenty of heat at the nano level. So, friction could cause enough heat to re-weld ( “cold weld”) metal if the metal has tiny ‘healable’ cracks perhaps? Just a guess from a lifetime metal worker.

Interesting.

[Montana_Sam]

Calls to mind an aspect of the Hutchinson Effect:
36 min video

Images of a penny that was 'absorbed' into a block of aluminum. One characteristic of the Hutchison Effect is that bars of metal would effectively 'disrupt' in a way that the bar would 'jellify' in the lateral center of the bar, and would separate into two pieces. There are images of brass, aluminum and steel bars thusly disrupted. Another aspect is levitation of objects, caught on video. All in all, quite an odd phenomenon, and not readily reproducible and not well understood.

[bigbob]

could revolutionize the car repair industry

[RoosterRedux]

Bfl

[EQAndyBuzz]

Combined with AI, I now view the movie franchise “Terminator” as a documentary.

[norwaypinesavage]

This was very interesting and certainly deserves more experimentation and analysis. Even so, I’m not expecting self-healing fractures in commercial products in the near future. Fatigue fractures are almost always associated with plastic strain at the crack tip. That is, there is microscopic permanent deformation between the fracture surfaces. This means that when they are reassembled, there is not an exact mirror matching of the two surfaces. It’s reasonable to expect that surfaces must be in intimate contact in order to achieve this ‘healing’. So, even if partial healing occurs at the points of contact, the healed part will be weaker than the original since not all of the atoms, molecules, or crystals will be rejoined. It also must be warm enough that sufficient diffusion among the atoms will occur. It’s not very warm in outer space where the vacuum might be adequate.

In addition, a good percentage of fractures in the real world are associated with corrosion. This can range from reduced part thickness to stress corrosion cracking at crack tips. This also defies the ‘in a vacuum’ component of the experiment.

[weezel]

I am Iron Man!