The primary research objective of this project is to develop new polymer composite panels for in-service damage self-healing through 1 design, synthesis, characterization, and manufacturing of two-way…

This is a $749,999.00 cooperative agreement awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the Louisiana Board of Regents, a state government agency responsible for coordinating public higher education in Louisiana. The primary objective of this project is to develop new self-healing polymer composite panels for aerospace applications. The work involves designing, synthesizing, and characterizing two-way shape memory polymers, multi-scale modeling of smart composite structures, and additive manufacturing and experimental evaluation of the composite panels for impact mitigation and in-service crack healing. This project supports several NASA research directorates and responds to state and institutional research priorities. The agreement does not have a set-aside designation, and the Louisiana Board of Regents likely subcontracts portions of the work to Louisiana universities such as Louisiana State University and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, which have expertise in relevant STEM disciplines.

The primary research objective of this project is to develop new polymer composite panels for in-service damage self-healing through 1 design, synthesis, characterization, and manufacturing of two-way shape memory polymers 2W-smps, which expand when temperature drops, even under compression 2 multi-scale modeling of the smart composite structures and 3 additive manufacturing using 3D printing and experimental evaluation of the smart composite panels for impact mitigation and in-service crack healing. The material to be investigated will be a smart self-healing composite with 2W-SMP particles dispersed in an ionomer matrix. The basic idea is that we will use the low temperature expansion of the embedded 2W-SMP particles to close the impact induced crack and the ionomer itself to heal the closed crack. This project targets several programs in the NASA aeronautics research mission directorate armd and human exploration & operations mission directorate heomd, and responds to state and institution research priorities. In aerospace and deep-space explorations, lightweight polymer composite structures are a critical component, and yet debilitating incidents from foreign object impact are not uncommon. For these in-service structures, post-impact repair by humans is either inaccessible or impossible, leading to disastrous structure collapse and mission failure, hence the need to develop in-service self-healing materials. The project educational objective involves developing a research-oriented approach designed to attract and retain a greater number of high caliber students, including underrepresented minority students, in stem disciplines, and train a larger number of high caliber stem students for NASA related industry. This project brings together researchers and students from louisiana state university LSU the louisiana flagship institution, and southern university SU in baton rouge-the main campus of the largest hbcu system in the nation, supported by NASA researchers at a variety of centers and industries, for a collaborative project that will provide exciting new results for NASA along with developing an important new capability in louisiana.