Development of Spread Carbon Fiber/Epoxy Laminates Encompassing Self-healing

Microscopic damage such as matrix crack, interlaminar fracture and interfacial debonding generates within carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRPs) and causes reduction in mechanical properties of CFRPs. Inspired by biological system, a concept of self-healing was proposed. Self-healing composites are designed to sense damage and repair automatically, thereby improving the reliability of CFRPs. Self-healing is accomplished by containers incorporating healing agents within matrix of CFRP, thus it is important to distribute containers throughout the matrix to obtain sufficient self-healing efficiency. In this paper, we present simply outline of self-healing CFRPs and report recently progress for self-healing spread carbon fiber (SCF)/ epoxy (EP) laminates.