AME Assistant Professor Yingtao Liu received a $15,000 research grant from the OU Research Council Faculty Investment Program to develop novel polymers with self-healing capability. Once complete, this exploratory project will be a solid foundation for the design, fabrication and development of multifunctional polymers and composites for aerospace, mechanical and civil engineering applications.

“We will focus on the synthesis and characterization of self-healing polymers in this project,” said Liu. “The self-healing process of the proposed polymers will mimic the biological systems that can autonomously repair the physical damage and recover the load ability after damage.”

Liu’s long term career goal is to develop an adaptive structural health management system for multi-physics damage diagnosis and prognosis by combining multifunctional materials, intelligent and multi-scale sensing, nondestructive evaluation, multi-scale and probabilistic modeling into a general framework. The successful development of intelligent materials and structural systems will be a game changing improvement of damage diagnosis, structural maintenance and risk management for various engineering applications. This project, which focuses on the self-healing capability, is one of the key elements in Liu’s long term research plan.