Self-healing composites material via hydrogen bonding interactions

The development of self-healing composites materials for structural applications offers considerable benefits: maintenance costs reduction and overcoming difficulties connected to damage diagnosis and repair. Depending on the self-repair mechanism, they are classified into two types: extrinsic self-healing and intrinsic self-healing. They involve covalent bonds, weak non-covalent interactions or a combination of both, based on reversible mechanism. Even when the materials seem to be at rest, a large number of covalent and/or non-covalent bonds are forming and breaking in dynamic equilibrium state. Thus, the self-healing process can be very efficient because much interaction may combine. Our research group is studying the possibility to have composite materials with efficient self-healing ability through hydrogen-bonding interactions. The copolymer poly(PEGMA-co-UPy), with various percentages of PEGMA and HEMA-Upy, can be blended with epoxy resins, for applications in the aeronautical field. This copolymer poly (PEGMA-co-UPy) confers self-healing properties to the resulting composite materials, thanks to the reversibility of hydrogen bond interactions among the polymer chains.