Targeted Self-Healing by Magnetically Guiding Microcapsules

Magnetically guided microcapsules are used to achieve self-healing with 1/10th of the healing components required using traditional self-healing approaches. Microcapsules are rendered responsive to magnetic fields by suspending magnetic nanoparticles in the core material. The nanoparticles are surface-modified to enable urea formaldehyde encapsulation within a phenyl acetate core. Magnetic fields are used to guide the microcapsules to the expected fracture location in tapered double-cantilever beam (TDCB) epoxy specimens. This guiding method achieves an order of magnitude increase in local microcapsule concentration over controls, resulting in successful self-healing at microcapsule concentrations as low as 0.025 wt %. Additionally, the observed healing is both more consistent and significantly higher than that of control specimens, remaining relatively constant across all weight percentages tested.