Review of Damping Composite Materials and Structures Involving Self-Healing Constituents

Newswise — In modern industries such as aviation, aerospace, and automotive, there is a continuous pursuit of extremely lightweight and multi-functional integrated structural designs. This requires structural materials not only to fulfill the load-bearing function in lightweight designs but also to possess high mechanical properties and high damping capabilities. Damping is crucial for addressing vibration-induced issues like instrument operation accuracy, vibration and noise control, equipment reliability, and component service life. However, traditional damping materials and structures face challenges: stiffness and damping properties are usually mutually exclusive, and self-healing materials, while having repairability and reprocessability, often see improved self-healing performance at the cost of mechanical properties. These problems hinder the enhancement of the dynamic performance of mechanical equipment, especially in fields with strict lightweight requirements.

Against this backdrop, Haibo FENG and Li LI from the State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, conducted a review study titled “Review of Damping Composite Materials and Structures Involving Self-Healing Constituents”.

This review first introduces different types of self-healing materials, including extrinsic self-healing materials (relying on external agents like microcapsules, hollow fibers, or vascular network systems) and intrinsic self-healing materials (based on reversible dynamic covalent or non-covalent bonds), as well as the close-then-heal (CTH) strategy. It then elaborates on the complex and contradictory relationships between self-healing materials and stiffness, damping properties—for instance, excessive dynamic bonds in self-healing materials weaken stiffness, and high-stiffness materials typically have poor damping performance. To address the challenge of improving specific damping performance, the review proposes a material–structure–performance integrated design methodology, which combines intrinsic damping sources (such as plastic damping, viscoelastic damping, and chemical damping at the nanoscale) and extrinsic deformation-driven modes (like interfacial interactions at the microscale, structural feature construction at the mesoscale, and composite structure design at the macroscale) as a holistic concept. This methodology explores the cross-scale coordination between intrinsic damping sources and extrinsic deformation-driven modes in the material’s microstructural architecture, aiming to achieve high stiffness and high damping performance.

The review also summarizes the stiffness enhancement mechanisms of self-healing polymers, including entropic forces in crosslinking, strong interface interactions, mechanical interlocking structures, and increased network crosslinking density. Additionally, it puts forward three design principles for specific damping performance of artificial composites, such as utilizing multiple nanoscale damping sources of soft materials and rationally designing the microstructure of the hard phase at each structural hierarchy level. Finally, the review points out that damping composite materials or structures with self-healing components are expected to be widely applied in modern industrial structural engineering, such as aviation, aerospace, navigation, automotive, and robot fields.

The paper “Review of Damping Composite Materials and Structures Involving Self-Healing Constituents” is authored by Haibo FENG and Li LI. The full text of the open-access paper is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11465-025-0833-7.