Experimental investigation on the energy absorption of self-healing composites subjected to impact loading

Self-healing materials with the ability to sense the damage and repair it automatically are a new and attractive class of engineering material. This type of materials has the ability to heal and restore material to its original set of properties when they are damaged. In this study, the impact properties of self-healing laminated composites are investigated experimentally using low velocity impact tests. The short hollow glass fibers (HGF), which contain the resin and hardener, were randomly distributed in the epoxy resin and the glass/epoxy specimens were fabricated using hand layup method. The length and diameter of the hollow glass fibers were 10-12 mm and 400-500 μm, respectively. In order to determine the healing efficiency of the composites, the specimens were damaged initially and subjected to impact tests after a period of time. The influence of some effective parameters including the healing time on the healing efficiency of the composite was investigated. The results of this work showed 50% increase of the absorbed energy in the damaged specimens due to using randomly short HGF in the composites