Self-Healing Structural Materials for Damage Tolerant Aerospace Vehicles, Year 2

The proposed effort describes how to develop novel lightweight, a self-healing system where self-repair is induced by the forces imparted by the damage event itself. This is possible because damage is induced by an energetic source high velocity projectile impact. By designing the molecular composition of a polymer to contain mechanoresponsive functional groups, it is possible to induce self-healing through the transformation of such chemical groups to a state where mechanical properties of the structure are almost completely restored, within fractions of seconds after the damage event occurs. The forces imparted by the damage event can therefore be used to enable healing or repair of the structure.