A Novel Self-Healing Epoxy System with Microencapsulated Epoxy and Imidazole Curing Agent

This work reported a novel epoxy system that can perform a self-repairing operation against cracks at elevated temperature. For this purpose, a two-component healing agent consisting of microencapsulated epoxy and imidazole was pre-embedded into epoxy matrix. The microencapsulated epoxy was self-synthesized in advance using poly(urea-formaldehyde) as the wall material through a two-step polymerization approach in an oil-in-water emulsion. The performance of the self-healing epoxy composite was evaluated by fracture toughness measurement. It was found that the self-healing epoxy containing 20wt.% healing agent received a healing efficiency of 106% at the optimum capsulated imidazole-to-epoxy weight ratio of 0.2.