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Photos: Nicole Casal Moore


Self-healing concrete works because it can bend. When it's strained, many microcracks form instead of one large crack that causes it to fail. Here, a specimen is bending as a force of five percent tensile strain is being applied. Regular concrete would fail at .01 percent tensile strain.

The white lines on this slab of bendable concrete show where the material has healed itself with no human intervention. Only water and carbon dioxide is necessary.

Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Victor Li shows a specimen of his new self-healing concrete.

Professor Victor Li and a civil and environmental engineering undergraduate student examine a slab of self-healing concrete that's been tested in the rain to see how well it heals.