Excellent durability of automotive coatings is the most important issue in protecting a vehicle surface. In addition, protective coating materials should be colourless and transparent so that the original colour of the product can be seen. However, it is difficult to provide a self-healing function while satisfying all of these conditions. Materials with free molecular movement have high self-healing efficiency, but have low durability, whereas materials with high hardness and excellent durability have remarkably poor self-healing performance.

A research team of Dr. Jin Chul Kim, Dr. Young il Park and Dr. Ji-Eun Jeong, from the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT), has developed a transparent coating material that satisfies all of the above conditions and has similar performance to that of commercial protective coating materials and which can be self-healed with only sunlight (particularly near-infrared light in sunlight, in the wavelength...