Percolation Modeling of Self-Damaging of Composite Materials

TL;DR

This paper introduces a percolation-based model for autonomous self-damaging in smart composite materials, demonstrating how sophisticated activation rules involving damaging and healing capsules can induce a sharp decline in material integrity after initial fatigue.

Contribution

It develops a novel percolation model for self-damaging composites, extending previous models to include complex activation rules for damage and healing capsules.

Findings

Self-damaging behavior requires sophisticated activation rules.

Sharp integrity drop achieved with combined damaging and healing capsules.

Monte Carlo simulations validate the model's effectiveness.

Abstract

We propose the concept of autonomous self-damaging in "smart" composite materials, controlled by activation of added nanosize "damaging" capsules. Percolation-type modeling approach earlier applied to the related concept of self-healing materials, is used to investigate the behavior of the initial material's fatigue. We aim at achieving a relatively sharp drop in the material's integrity after some initial limited fatigue develops in the course of the sample's usage. Our theoretical study considers a two-dimensional lattice model and involves Monte Carlo simulations of the connectivity and conductance in the high-connectivity regime of percolation. We give several examples of local capsule-lattice and capsule-capsule activation rules and show that the desired self-damaging property can only be obtained with rather sophisticated "smart" material's response involving not just damaging but also healing capsules.