Self-healing and self-sensing smart polymer composites

Abstract Enhanced internal damages such as cracks and microcracks in advanced polymer composites generated during their service life, which affects adversely the performance of composite materials, are of a great concern. As a result overall failure and fracture occur much sooner than their expected lifetime. To prolong the lifetime of advanced composite materials, current technologies seek smart techniques to detect damages inherently and repair them internally before those damages make a final failure. In this context, self-sensing and self-healing are known as two important characteristics of responsive (smart) systems to detect the damages intrinsically and to reconstruct them internally. The development of polymer composites with smart self-sensing and self-healing features is a new and attractive research field with potential applications including aerospace, transportation, coating, electronics, and robotics. This chapter initially introduces the concepts and technologies related to self-sensing and self-healing in polymer composites and a brief discussion concerning their challenges and recent achievements. It is then followed by a review of recent progress on research strategies for linking these techniques. Applications of such systems in various fields are also taken into account for the recent achievements.