Integrated self-healing of the composite offshore structures.

The self-repairing composite materials integrated with sensing is way forward to reduce maintenance cost and increase consumer safety. In this work, the novel self-healing carbon fibre reinforced unidirectional bulk tape of simple architecture is prepared using nanocomposite film. The bulk material tape was prepared using nanocomposite film of low melting temperature polymer sandwiched between two carbon fibre reinforced unidirectional tapes. First, the nanocomposite polyamide 6 (PA 6) tape with iron oxide nanoparticle was prepared using in-situ polymerization and mixing method. The iron oxide nanoparticle was silane coated suing tri-phasic reverse emulsion method to achieve better dispersion in PA 6 matrix. The nanocomposite was characterized using FTIR, XRD, DSC and TEM. Result shows that the proposed method of preparing self-healing bulk tape material has potential to be used for self-healing composite structure.