Autonomous structural materials with controlled toughening and healing

The field of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has grown significantly over the past few years due to safety and performance enhancing benefits as well as potential life saving capabilities offered by technology. Current advances in SHM systems have lead to a variety of techniques capable of identifying damage. However, few strategies exist for using this information to quickly react to environmental or material conditions needed to repair or protect the system. Rather, current systems simply relay this information to a central processor or human operator who then decides on a course of action, such as altering the mission or scheduling a repair operation. Biological systems exhibit many advanced sensory and healing traits that can be applied to the design of material systems. For instance, bones are the major structural component in vertebrates; however, unlike modern structural materials, bones have many properties that make it effective for arresting the development and propagation of cracks and subsequent healing of the damaged region. Mimicking biological materials, an autonomous material system was developed that uses Shape Memory Polymers (SMPs) with an embedded fiber optic network. This thesis researches a novel system that uses SMPs and employs an optical fiber network as both a damage detection sensor and a network to deliver stimulus to the damage site, initiating active toughening and healing algorithms. In the presence of damage, the fiber optic fractures, which allowed a high power laser diode to deposit a controlled level of thermal energy at the damage site, locally reducing the modulus and blunting the crack tip. The shape memory polymer not only provided a sharp glass transition, but also allowed for the application of an programmed global pre-strain, which under thermal loads induced the shape memory effect to close the crack and adequately heal the polymer to its designed operational conditions recovering full strength. It will be shown that the material can be significantly toughened and that control algorithms combined with the shape memory properties can further increase the toughening and healing effect. The entire system will be able to effectively sense damage, defend its propagation by actively toughening, and subsequently heal the structure, autonomously in a real time operational environment.