If you get a cut or break a bone, your body heals itself. This everyday miracle is what inspired [Congrui Jin] to try to find a way to make concrete self-healing. The answer she and her colleagues are working on might surprise you. They are adding fungus to concrete to enable self-repair.
It isn’t just any fungus. The conditions in concrete are very harsh, and after testing twenty different kinds, they found that one kind — trichoderma reesei — could survive inside concrete as spores. This fungus is widespread in tropical soil and doesn’t pose any threat to humans or the ecology. Mixing nutrients and spores into concrete is easy enough. When cracks form in the concrete, water and oxygen get in and the spores grow. The spores act as a catalyst for calcium carbonate crystals which fill the cracks. When the water is gone, the fungi go back to spores, ready to repair future cracking.
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