Development of 3D-Printed Self-Healing Capsules with a Separate Membrane and Investigation of Mechanical Properties for Improving Fracture Strength

Studies on self-healing capsules embedded in cement composites to heal such cracks have recently been actively researched in order to improve the dimensional stability of concrete structures. In particular, capsule studies were mainly conducted to separately inject reactive healing solutions into different capsules. However, with this method, there is an important limitation in that the probability of self-healing is greatly reduced because the two healing solutions must meet and react. Therefore, we propose three-dimensional (3D) printer-based self-healing capsules with a membrane structure that allows two healing solutions to be injected into one capsule. Among many 3D printing methods, we used the fusion deposition modeling (FDM) to design, analyze, and produce new self-healing capsules, which are widely used due to their low cost, precise manufacturing, and high-speed. However, polylactic lactic acid (PLA) extruded in the FDM has low adhesion energy between stacked layers, which causes different fracture strengths depending on the direction of the applied load and the subsequent performance degradation of the capsule. Therefore, the isotropic fracture characteristics of the newly proposed four types of separated membrane capsules were analyzed using finite element method analysis. Additionally, capsules were produced using the FDM method, and the compression test was conducted by applying force in the x, y, and z directions. The isotropic fracture strength was also analyzed using the relative standard deviation (RSD) parameter. As a result, the proposed separated membrane capsule showed that the RSD of isotropic fracture strength over all directions fell to about 18% compared to other capsules.