Next-Generation Self-Healing Lubricants for Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment Connectors

Through the proposed SBIR program, NanoSonic will design and empirically optimize self-healing microparticles that significantly extend the lifetime of silicone lubricants used within liquid cooling and ventilation garment connectors. NanoSonicrsquo;s lubricant filled microcapsules will be precisely tailored for direct compatibility within existing silicone lubricants used by team member ILC Dover and have highly elastic silicone shells that are empirically optimized to gradually break down and release highly dispersible silicone oil into existing seal and gasket greases slowly over extended, simulated tribological wear cycles. The proposed effort will directly build from NanoSonicrsquo;s self-healing coating microcapsules and have direct commercial scalability using established oil-in-water suspension polymerization reactions. In support of a low-risk Phase III transition, the proposed self-sealing HybridSilreg; microcapsules will be intrinsically designed for near term 55-gallon production quantities within an established manufacturing infrastructure.nbsp;NanoSonicrsquo;s lubricant filled microcapsules will directly build from its established self-healing polymeric capsule materials. This capsule technology was uniquely tailored to provide aerospace topcoats a mechanism to autonomously heal themselves from laceration, puncture, and abrasion threats in addition to having long-term environmental durability. NanoSonic is currently working to transition this technology to multiple defense prime and government groups for direction integration into polyurethane aerospace topcoats such as MIL-PRF-85285E.nbsp;