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An Analysis of the Effect of Activation Temperature and Crack Geometry on the Healing Efficiency of Polycaprolactone (PCL)/Epoxy Blends

Self-healing materials have attracted great interest in recent years. Particularly, the use of thermoset/thermoplastics blends has emerged as a good option with relatively low activation temperatures and potential infinite healing cycles. Nevertheless, a methodical study of healing conditions and ev...

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Autores principales: Calderón-Villajos, Rocío, Fernández Sánchez-Romate, Xoan, Jiménez-Suárez, Alberto, Prolongo, Silvia González
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9862102/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36679216
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/polym15020336
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author Calderón-Villajos, Rocío
Fernández Sánchez-Romate, Xoan
Jiménez-Suárez, Alberto
Prolongo, Silvia González
author_facet Calderón-Villajos, Rocío
Fernández Sánchez-Romate, Xoan
Jiménez-Suárez, Alberto
Prolongo, Silvia González
author_sort Calderón-Villajos, Rocío
collection PubMed
description Self-healing materials have attracted great interest in recent years. Particularly, the use of thermoset/thermoplastics blends has emerged as a good option with relatively low activation temperatures and potential infinite healing cycles. Nevertheless, a methodical study of healing conditions and evaluation is still required for further industrial development. The effect of activation temperature and crack morphology in polycaprolactone (PCL)/epoxy blends are explored. For this purpose, PCL content was varied (5, 10, and 15 wt %) with contents lower than critical composition. Therefore, the morphology of all studied blends is the epoxy matrix with a separated PCL phase. In this sense, an increase in PCL content leads to a reduction in the Tg, due to the partial PCL miscibility, and the presence of larger PCL domains. It was observed that a higher temperature (150 °C) and PCL content led to a more efficient self-healing process because of both the lower viscosity of the melted PCL at higher temperatures and the presence of larger PCL reservoirs when increasing the PCL content. Crack morphology influence was studied by inducing cracks with different tools: a custom crack machine with a cutting blade, a scalpel, and a pin. The results show that the recovery was better when the cracks were smaller and shallower, that is, with the pin. In addition, the healing efficiency by means of both parameters, crack volume and depth change, showed more similar results in slimmer cracks, due to a lower crack width-to-depth ratio.
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spelling pubmed-98621022023-01-22 An Analysis of the Effect of Activation Temperature and Crack Geometry on the Healing Efficiency of Polycaprolactone (PCL)/Epoxy Blends Calderón-Villajos, Rocío Fernández Sánchez-Romate, Xoan Jiménez-Suárez, Alberto Prolongo, Silvia González Polymers (Basel) Article Self-healing materials have attracted great interest in recent years. Particularly, the use of thermoset/thermoplastics blends has emerged as a good option with relatively low activation temperatures and potential infinite healing cycles. Nevertheless, a methodical study of healing conditions and evaluation is still required for further industrial development. The effect of activation temperature and crack morphology in polycaprolactone (PCL)/epoxy blends are explored. For this purpose, PCL content was varied (5, 10, and 15 wt %) with contents lower than critical composition. Therefore, the morphology of all studied blends is the epoxy matrix with a separated PCL phase. In this sense, an increase in PCL content leads to a reduction in the Tg, due to the partial PCL miscibility, and the presence of larger PCL domains. It was observed that a higher temperature (150 °C) and PCL content led to a more efficient self-healing process because of both the lower viscosity of the melted PCL at higher temperatures and the presence of larger PCL reservoirs when increasing the PCL content. Crack morphology influence was studied by inducing cracks with different tools: a custom crack machine with a cutting blade, a scalpel, and a pin. The results show that the recovery was better when the cracks were smaller and shallower, that is, with the pin. In addition, the healing efficiency by means of both parameters, crack volume and depth change, showed more similar results in slimmer cracks, due to a lower crack width-to-depth ratio. MDPI 2023-01-09 /pmc/articles/PMC9862102/ /pubmed/36679216 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/polym15020336 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Calderón-Villajos, Rocío
Fernández Sánchez-Romate, Xoan
Jiménez-Suárez, Alberto
Prolongo, Silvia González
An Analysis of the Effect of Activation Temperature and Crack Geometry on the Healing Efficiency of Polycaprolactone (PCL)/Epoxy Blends
title An Analysis of the Effect of Activation Temperature and Crack Geometry on the Healing Efficiency of Polycaprolactone (PCL)/Epoxy Blends
title_full An Analysis of the Effect of Activation Temperature and Crack Geometry on the Healing Efficiency of Polycaprolactone (PCL)/Epoxy Blends
title_fullStr An Analysis of the Effect of Activation Temperature and Crack Geometry on the Healing Efficiency of Polycaprolactone (PCL)/Epoxy Blends
title_full_unstemmed An Analysis of the Effect of Activation Temperature and Crack Geometry on the Healing Efficiency of Polycaprolactone (PCL)/Epoxy Blends
title_short An Analysis of the Effect of Activation Temperature and Crack Geometry on the Healing Efficiency of Polycaprolactone (PCL)/Epoxy Blends
title_sort analysis of the effect of activation temperature and crack geometry on the healing efficiency of polycaprolactone (pcl)/epoxy blends
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9862102/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36679216
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/polym15020336
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