Science, but certainly not fiction

“We’re developing coating technology that once you scratch it, over time, it will heal itself. It does it by taking moisture in the air around, which will basically eliminate a scratch and restore material to its original condition. It would do it time and again without any external intervention. And that is a significant advance over what’s currently out there in the world of self-healing materials.”

Prof Varley’s self-healing coatings isn’t the only remarkable development coming out of labs right now. In a range of different fields, researchers are making what sounds like fiction a reality.

For instance, PhD student Dilendra Wijesekara together with Deakin and the Ear Science Institute of Australia have been working on ways to restore hearing to those suffering from chronic middle ear disease, which affects more than 200 million people worldwide — including many living in Australia’s remote communities.

Chronic middle ear disease can cause ruptured eardrums, requiring surgery in which a graft is inserted into the ear to help rebuild the ruptured tissue. A packing material is inserted to support the graft, stop any bleeding, and aerate the middle ear. However, the current packing material in use can lead to fibrosis, an overgrowth of scar tissue. What doctors need is a material that won’t cause that complication.

“And so that’s why we thought, OK, what about silk?” Wijesekara says.

What’s truly special about the use of that material is that silk is made of two components — fibroin fibres and sericin, a protein that coats the fibre. Most silk manufacturers simply discard the sericin when creating silk products. It’s only recently that research has found sericin has antimicrobial and antioxidant properties. Wijesekara’s research is looking at using sericin in packing material to overcome the problems of the current materials and control its degradation to suit patient needs.

But limited research had been done into exactly how to extract high quality sericin — until Wijesekara came along.

“We were just working in the lab, doing some experiments, when we figured there’s an easy way to remove sericin,” she explains. “It was accidental, so it was really a game-changer.”

Meanwhile, at Deakin University’s Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation, Associate Professor Michael Johnstone and his team have been working on an innovative new way to safely study driver behaviour and enhance driver training.

The Genesis Simulator is a motion simulator that offers an immersive “driving” experience.

“You can plug it into any virtual world, from a typical Australian highway to some of the world’s most famous tracks, and feel all the bumps and movement you would feel driving on different road surfaces,” says A/Prof Johnstone. “You can add traffic, adapt the environment to night and day, change the weather conditions or add a trailer to your vehicle.”

It’s a one-of-a-kind development that will provide the opportunity to test and develop how drivers respond to different conditions — helping, for instance, the development of self-driving cars. All without anyone being put in a high-risk situation.

These forward-thinking projects are each at different stages of development. The Genesis Simulator is already being used for a range of different projects and has been made available for research partners within the transport industry. Prof Varley’s self-healing coatings are currently undergoing trials at offshore platforms in Malaysia. And Wijesekara’s silk packing material is still in early stages but has already made “significant improvements” in development.

Each one, however, is proving how, with the right support and resources, even the most fantastical ideas can become a reality.

To find out more about how Deakin research is leading the way, click here.