Preventing Failure Before It Happens: Inside Self-healing Composites
By Michelle Fiscus, Senior VP & Chief Communications Officer
A crack forms inside an aircraft wing. No audible sound. No visible damage. Nothing a pilot or mechanic can see.
But inside the material, layers are separating—quietly weakening the structure until, under enough stress, it catastrophically fails.
That’s the problem Dr. Jason Patrick has spent his career trying to solve. An Associate Professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at NC State University, Patrick focuses on what happens before failure—when damage is already present, but no one can detect it.
Fiber-reinforced composites—used in aerospace, wind energy, and other high-performance applications—don’t fail gradually like ductile metals. They fail suddenly.
“These materials often fail in a brittle manner…sudden and catastrophic without much warning,” he explains. The most common issue is delamination, when the internal layers of a composite material begin to separate. Once that happens, “the structural capacity is greatly reduced,” and normal operating loads can push the compromised material past its limits.
The problem is made worse by the fact that the damage is nearly impossible to see. These failures start as micro-cracks beneath the surface—caused by fatigue, manufacturing defects, or impact—and grow over time.
“Subsurface damage is essentially invisible,” Patrick says. Even advanced detection methods struggle to identify defects at that scale in these heterogeneous materials.
So instead of trying to detect the damage earlier, Patrick takes a different approach: by enabling the material to repair itself.
His team has developed a self-healing composite that can repair internal cracks—not once, but more than 1,000 times.
The self-healing concept borrows from biology. Some strategies release liquid agents from vascular networks when damaged, much like bleeding after a cut. But repeatability is limited in these systems. Patrick’s approach relies on activating an embedded thermally remendable healing agent that rebonds cracks via internal heat generation, without requiring human intervention or compromising structural integrity.
“After a decade of fundamental research, we have figured out the secrets to interfacial chemistry and in situ heat generation to create a repeatable self-healing strategy for fiber-reinforced composites,” he says.
The result is a tough structural material that doesn’t just resist damage—it self-recovers from it. And not only in controlled lab conditions, but in ways that could extend the usable life of real-world systems by decades, even centuries.
Patrick’s team has recently demonstrated over 1,000 healing cycles, one hundred times greater than the state-of-the-art. Even a single repair cycle can significantly reduce long-term costs. In industries like aerospace, where maintenance, repair, and overhaul already exceed $20 billion annually and continue to rise, that life extension matters.
But the challenge now isn’t proving the material works. It’s determining where it works best—and getting it into actual platforms.
“We know the patented technology works…now the question becomes where is the greatest market matchup and who to partner with to evaluate the technology in real-world applications,” he says.
That shift—from lab coupons to real-world use—is where most technologies stall.
Without funding, Patrick is direct about what happens next: “our R&D program would remain largely confined to laboratory experiments, without real-world validation.”
NCInnovation funding is critical to move beyond that point—supporting industry validation with partners in aerospace, defense, and energy, and helping the team evaluate how the self-healing strategy performs under actual operating conditions.
“We now have the ability to pursue industrial applications with North Carolina-based partners,” Patrick says.
It’s not theoretical progress. It’s focused effort: identifying use cases, testing performance in relevant environments, and determining how the material integrates within existing systems and manufacturing processes.
The implications are straightforward. Structures that last longer. Fewer inspections. Less downtime. Lower costs. And fewer catastrophic failures that initiate from damage that no one ever sees.
Because today, when composite materials fail, they don’t give warnings—they just break.
Patrick’s disruptive technology represents a paradigm shift in design—by transforming classically passive materials to those that actively respond to damage—for safer, more resilient structures with longer lifetimes.