Development on Microcapsule Based Self-Healing Polymer Coatings for Corrosion Protection

Self-healing coatings, known as “smart” coatings, are of particular interest because these coatings can provide automatic repair and recovery. A healing agent is embedded into the coating and will release to repair damaged structures once the self-healing function is triggered. The prolonged service lifetime of self-healing coatings will result in less maintenance and cost reductions. While this concept is sound, a reliable application in coatings has not been identified. Therefore, the objective of this study is to develop a novel experimental approach to build self-healing polymer coatings for corrosion protection.

This study will optimize procedures to generate stable microcapsule based self-healing coatings, establish reliable techniques to rapidly evaluate the performance of embedded healing agent, and monitor coating performances to quantitatively evaluate the effect of self-healing function for corrosion protection. The self-healing coatings’ electrochemical property, mechanical property, and corrosion protective property will be studied by using several characterization methods, such as electrochemical impedance spectroscopy.