Paint by Collideascope in Hornsby, Sydney Australia. Photo: The Bear

There can be few events in your relationship to a new motorcycle that are as distressing as finding the first scratch in the pristine paintwork. They are usually small, but once you know they’re there you find yourself looking at them over and over. Well, a new coating can self-heal scratches with as little as half an hour of sunlight exposure. In future, they might even be gone before you notice them reports web news site New Atlas.

Scientists in Korea have developed this coating that self-heals scratches in as little as 30 minutes when exposed to sunlight. The new coating contains a polymer network based on acryl polyol, with what’s called a hindered urea structure. Essentially, the polymers have dynamic chemical bonds that can break apart in response to a stimulus (the scratch) and then reform in their original arrangement, effectively repairing minor damage like scratches. In this case the trigger is heat, which is provided by an organic photothermal dye that captures infrared light, also embedded in the coating.

Importantly, the new coating including the dye is transparent, so it won’t affect the color of your bike’s paint, and can be applied using existing spray-coating methods. At the moment cars are seen as the primary use for the as-yet unnamed coating, but the team says it could also be applied to other often-scratched devices like phones or building materials. They didn’t mention bikes, but the application is obvious.

Demonstrating the effect on a model car, the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT) team showed that the coating heals scratches in 30 minutes of unobstructed midday sunlight. In theory, that means someone could scratch your bike while parking next to it and the scratch would be gone before you came back.

If for some reason half an hour is too long for you to wait, the team also demonstrated that the process can be drastically sped up under concentrated light. Using a magnifying glass to focus sunlight onto the mark patched it up in less than 30 seconds.

The KRICT team says the new coating has a few advantages over existing self-healing coatings. Using organic photothermal dyes means it needs far less energy to work than current versions. These usually require heat guns or concentrated UV lights. Slower coatings, like Nissan’s Scratch Shield, require less intense energy but can take up to a week to do their work. The new coating can also repair a scratch in the same location multiple times, unlike self-healing materials that work using bursting capsules of resin.

Would I use this? On a bike like my Triumph Street Twin with its expensive aftermarket paint job, I would!