Self repairing system
The capability of self repair is unlike redundancy not a necessary feature of AP materials and products. It can help doing recycling by greatly reducing the rate of waste production but also can prolong the wastes lifetime. Further it is obviously prolonging product lifetimes or times of good performance to very long (and hard to predict) time-spans. Added high level repair effectively extendes lifetimes ad infinitum making other limiting factors more relevant (certain natural disasters).
The main kinds of damage include:
- radiation damage
- thermal damage (internal or external)
- mechanical damage
- chemical damage (including weathering)
Different kinds of damage need different treatment.
Self repair can be done either off-line or live.
The simplest form of repair is feeding the damaged objects back in a microcomponent recomposer or a complete nanofactory capable of repair. There to check which ones are still usable and reassemble the original object with microcomponents considered ok or new ones. Damage that fuses regions of microcomponents together are a lot more difficult to handle (assembly level IV).
Repairing damage live in a product that is under use (e.g. a mokel needs means for internal transport for microcomponents e.g. legged block mobility in a channel network. this further complicates the systems design and lowers maximal performance.
Countering natural decay
Nature always wins and takes back was man has built. For the better or the worse this common saying will slowly loose its truth with the emergence and improvement of artificial self repairing systems.
With weathering including abrasion root growth and UV radiation there are chemical mechanical and radiative damage sources. ...
Diamond is rather resilient to bases and acids. Abrasive damage through silicate dust carried by the wind is more likely to do damage. ...
Thermal damage
Thermal overexposure of macroscopic volumes (singed spots) need those volumes to be disposed and replaced. (microcomponent damage crop-out)
If there are means for microcomponent disassembly (reversible locking mechanisms are used) each microcomponent can be tested for their functions which they expose. Furthermore microcomponents may provide a functionality to test some internal functionalities. Still not everything can be tested some displaced atoms or structures may be undetectable and cause failure at a delayed point in time. But the testing functionality might itself be broken. Very speculatively and not seriously considered her one might try to use TEM (transmission electro microscopy or gentler future de-broglie-matter-wave microscopy) to check all the atoms positions but that itself might induce damage and take too long.
In essence one never can know for sure whether a microcomponent still has all atoms in place (is AP) or not. Thus the border between still usable and damaged microcomponents is fuzzy.
After self repair the outer part of the fuzzy damage shell remains in the original product or got to be reused elsewhere When repairing external thermal damage one has to draw a line (shell) between the microcomponents that ought to remain and the ones that are to be disposed (burnt). Reusing microcomponents too close to the thermal damage can cause some kind of "invisible damage poisoning" so its generally better to keep your space the highly damaged area and generously cut away and dispose of microcomponents instead of reusing all the ones that still fulfill their external function at the time of scavenging / repair.
To decide whether to reuse a microcomponent or not the integration of a thermal seal might be useful. When scavenging microcomponents from the vicinity of a damaged area an internal pristinity switch could be flipped or a usage counter incremented.
Getting out the highly damaged macroscopically fused block is another issue.
related: consistent design for external limiting factors; microcomponent tagging
[Todo: add auto detection of waste state;dead man's button ...]
