Self-healing composite materials hold the potential to alleviate a number of challenges including sustainability of structural material properties, reducing or eliminating repair and replacement costs, and reducing the failure risks of critical components in engineering devices and structures. Currently, microcapsules for use in self-healing material are fabricated by batch emulsification and an accompanying shell polymerization mechanism. Such a technology has limited control over microcapsules size due to heterogenous shear forces and delocalized droplet formation present in emulsification. The shell formation mechanism however, presents opportunities to control mechanical properties and surface morphology.In this presentation we will demonstrate production of self-healing microcapsules with controlled size and surface morphology by tuning microfludic emulsification and polymerization parameters respecitvely. Such size and morphology control has been proved to have significant implications on self-healing performance.

Size and morphology control of microcapsules for self-healing material

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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