When Scott R. White considered an offer from the University of Illinois in 1990, he liked what he saw: a world-ranked university and college of engineering capable of supporting any research he could imagine. And he had some imaginative ideas.

"It just looked like a great place to be. The experimental facilities that were available for me to do my research were phenomenal. There was nothing that could compare to it. I really liked the faculty I met," he said, "and it sounded like home to me."

White not only made himself at home in the Department of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, but also in other departments as he sought out colleagues to collaborate on cutting-edge composites research.

"One of the advantages to being at the U of I is that it’s easy to work in multidisciplinary fields. I can go over to someone’s office and talk to them about doing research and the next day we can start," he said. "There has never been a time when I envisioned an experiment that I couldn’t do here from the perspectives of talent and state-of-the art experimental and computational facilities."

White’s research initially focused on the processing science of composites and such questions as how materials cure and how residual stresses develop. Conducted over the past decade with fellow scientists Charles Tucker, a mechanical engineer, and Philippe Guebelle, an aeronautics engineer, the project has yielded important data with broad applications for research and industry.

A few years ago, White also became intrigued by "smart materials." One of the first new materials he targeted for development and testing was a shape-memory composite that would "remember" a particular shape and return to that shape after being stretched or altered. Installed in jet engine inlet ducts, such a material could function like flaps and allow supersonic aircraft to fly more efficiently. Another potential use is for artificial muscles, which must move and stretch, but return to a resting shape.

White is also working with exotic materials, such as magnetostrictive materials that change shape if a magnetic field is applied. In tests, a small amount, less than 1%, of magnetostrictive materials added to a polymer composite gave the composite self-assessment capability—the material "knew" when it was damaged. The principle, White explained, is that cracks form wherever damage occurs, and the cracks that need to be fixed create high magnetic fields that can be scanned and measured.

If those materials sound like the stuff of science fiction, consider the new, "self-healing" synthetic material White and his colleagues reported in the February issue of Nature. White, working again with Geubelle and also with Nancy Sottos, theoretical and applied mechanics, and Jeffrey Moore, chemistry, along with graduate students Eric Brown, Michael Kessler, Suresh Sriram, and Sabarivasan Viswanathan, developed a composite containing microcapsules of fluid dicyclopentadinene and a catalyst.

When a crack ruptures the microcapsules, the fluid is released. As it comes in contact with the catalyst in the composite matrix, the fluid forms a new polymer that bonds the surfaces of the cracks — a self-healing effect. This kind of material could be especially useful where repairs are difficult, such as deep-space probes, implanted medical devices, electronic circuit boards, or containers that hold liquids or gas under pressure.

The comparison of his work to science fiction is no surprise to White, a science fiction buff himself. "It’s very exciting to be involved with this kind of research right now and to be taking those first steps. The long-term view I have of materials research and the type of work that we are doing will have tremendous impact on society."

One of the next innovations might be materials with autonomic function, which White described as materials having an automatic action without requiring human intervention or human thought. For example, he envisions a day when self-generating, biocompatible materials might be applied to the body to grow skin on burn victims or be injected into the body to grow artificial organs or mend bones.