Self-healing materials are attracting increasing interest of the research community, over the last decades, due to their efficiency in detecting and “autonomically” healing damage. Numerous attempts are being presented every year focusing on the development of different self-healing systems as well as their integration to large scale production with the best possible property–cost relationship. The current work aims to present the most recent breakthroughs in these attempts from many different research groups published during the last five years. The current review focuses in polymeric systems and their composites. The reviewed literature is presented in three distinct categories, based on three different scopes of interest. These categories are (i) the materials and systems employed, (ii) the experimental techniques for the evaluation of materials properties and self-healing efficiency of the materials/structures and (iii) the characterization techniques utilized in order to evaluate (off-line) and monitor (on-line) the healing efficiency of the proposed systems. Published works are presented separately in all the different categories, thus the interested reader is advised to follow the structure of the review and refer to the chapter of interest.

Self-healing materials: A review of advances in materials, evaluation, characterization and monitoring techniques

Self-healing polymer composites possess the inherent ability to heal the damage event autonomically or non-autonomically with external intervention. These advanced materials can be commercialized if the challenges and limitations of different self-healing mechanisms are well known and considered. These include capsule-based healing systems, vascular healing systems, and intrinsic healing systems. To date, most of the reviews have studied and reported on different self-healing mechanisms including their response to impact, fatigue, and corrosion tests. This review focuses mostly on extrinsic and intrinsic self-healing polymer composites which have been reported during the past five years by comparing their healing efficiency, advantages, and challenges in the prospect of their future development as well as their possible applications across various industries such as aerospace, automobile, coating, electronics, energy, etc.

Self-Healing Polymer Composites: Prospects, Challenges, and Applications

Ballistic impact mechanisms – A review on textiles and fibre-reinforced composites impact responses

Coupling of FEM meshes with Peridynamic grids

Ionomers are polymers with bonded ionic species that are used under conditions where the salt groups are in a condensed state. This Feature Article discusses the state of our understanding of ionomers and the historical applications of these nanostructured polymers. It also discusses modern methods for synthesizing new ionomers and describes a number of relatively new applications for ionomers and the potential use of these materials in contemporary technologies, including, shape memory and self-healing materials and supramolecular polymer systems.

Teo Mudric

Papers

Coupling of FEM meshes with Peridynamic grids

An effective way to couple FEM meshes and Peridynamics grids for the solution of static equilibrium problems

A coupled meshless finite point/Peridynamic method for 2D dynamic fracture analysis

Comparison of self-healing ionomer to aluminium-alloy bumpers for protecting spacecraft equipment from space debris impacts

3DPD: A photogrammetric pipeline for a PUSH frame stereo cameras