Self-healing Materials: Microcapsules

Microcapsules are one of the most crucial factors in fabricating self-healing materials, and must be carefully engineered.

Making these microcapsules is a complex problem with many requirements: the encapsulation procedure must be compatible with the reactive healing agent, the liquid healing agent must not diffuse out of the capsule wall during its potentially long shelf-life, and the microcapsule walls must be strong and tough enough to handle the processing conditions of the host composite, while maintaining excellent adhesion with the cured polymer matrix to ensure that the capsules rupture upon composite fracture [my publication list].

Our colleagues develop a simpler method to prepare melamine-urea-formaldehyde (MUF) microcapsules, which exhibit superior properties compared to the urea-formaldehyde (UF) microcapsules used extensively for self-healing composites to date. The MUF microcapsules containing various healing agents are successfully fabricated, and highlighted on the cover of Macromolecular Materials and Engineering, July 9, 2009.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Self-healing Materials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.