Self-Healing Materials

This freshly updated Second Edition of Self-Healing Materials: Principles and Technology provides engineers and researchers in both industry and academia the information they need to deploy self-healing technology in a wide range of potential applications, from adhesives to the automotive industry and from electronics to biomedical implants. Developments are increasingly seeing real-world application, and this book enables practitioners to use this technology in their own work.

The book first discusses the principal mechanisms of self-healing and how these are applied to the development of materials that have the ability to repair themselves, either with minimal or no human intervention at all. The book provides a theoretical background and a review of the major research undertaken to date, to give a thorough grounding in this concept and related technology.

The second part of the book compares the parameters of different self-healing technological processes, such as fault detection mechanisms, methods of triggering and turning off the healing processes, the activation energy of self-healing processes, the means and methods of delivery of the healing substances to the defect locations, self-healing timescale (rate of self-healing), and the extent of self-healing (healing efficiency, recovery of properties, etc.).

The third part is devoted to mathematical modeling of the processes of self-healing (molecular dynamics simulation), the morphology of healed areas, and the discussion of applying the most important analytical techniques to the evaluation of the self-healing processes. The book concludes with a section providing practical advice on the selection of additives for self-healing formulation, methods of self-healing of different polymers, and application of self-healing technology in different groups of products.