Percolation Modeling of Conductance of Self-Healing Composites

TL;DR

This paper models how conductance measurements can serve as indicators of damage and self-healing in composite materials, combining theoretical and simulation approaches to understand the early fatigue regime.

Contribution

It introduces a combined continuum and lattice modeling approach to analyze conductance as a measure of self-healing in composites, highlighting the delay of fatigue onset.

Findings

Conductance shows a plateau during initial fatigue, indicating self-healing effects.

Material quality degradation can be monitored via transport properties.

Self-healing extends the fatigue onset time.

Abstract

We explore the conductance of self-healing materials as a measure of the material integrity in the regime of the onset of the initial fatigue. Continuum effective-field modeling and lattice numerical simulations are reported. Our results illustrate the general features of the self-healing process: The onset of the material fatigue is delayed, by developing a plateau-like time-dependence of the material quality. We demonstrate that in this low-damage regime, the changes in the conductance and similar transport/response properties of the material can be used as measures of the material quality degradation.