Self-Healing Polymer Composites: Prospects, Challenges, and Applications

Self-healing polymer composites possess the inherent ability to heal the damage event autonomically or non-autonomically with external intervention. These advanced materials can be commercialized if the challenges and limitations of different self-healing mechanisms are well known and considered. These include capsule-based healing systems, vascular healing systems, and intrinsic healing systems. To date, most of the reviews have studied and reported on different self healing mechanisms including their response to impact, fatigue, and corrosion tests. This review focuses mostly on extrinsic and intrinsic self-healing polymer composites which have been reported during the past five years by comparing their healing efficiency, advantages, and challenges in the prospect of their future development as well as their possible applications across various industries such as aerospace, automobile, coating, electronics, energy, etc.