Integrated Sensing, Monitoring and Healing of Composite Systems

The ability of a material to recover its nominal properties through self-healing is gaining interest in the research community. However, current approaches remain predominantly passive in counteracting the effect of damage. As a result, healing only begins when the material has occurred damage and typically there is a mismatch between the healing and damage rate. For applications such as aircraft, where there is a thin line between functionality and non-functionality, these limitations may be inherently restrictive. A self-healing system that combines a prognosis unit to predict and estimate the failure rate and an active self-healing system that matches the healing rate to the estimated failure rate using a feedback loop, has the potential to overcome these limitations. In this paper we propose such a system and present results for its application to composite materials.