Percolation Modeling of Conductance of Self-Healing Composites

We explore the conductance of self-healing materials as a measure of the material integrity in the regime of the onset of the initial fatigue. Continuum effective-field modeling and lattice numerical simulations are reported. Our results illustrate the general features of the self-healing process: The onset of the material fatigue is delayed, by developing a plateau-like time-dependence of the material quality. We demonstrate that in this low-damage regime, the changes in the conductance and similar transport/response properties of the material can be used as measures of the material quality degradation.