Assessment of microscopic repair dynamics in self-healing polymer by modeling laser speckle images. (9th October 2018) - Ansari, Mohammad Z
Abstract: Self-healing in polymers plays an important role, since such polymers can spontaneously repair any damage introduced into them, and this in turn can enhance the durability and reliability of functional materials. Employment of the laser speckle imaging (LSI) technique can picture the microscopic repair dynamics of the healing process in real time. To assess the repair dynamics during the healing process, one needs to acquire a large amount of LSI data, and because of this the visual inspection of healing dynamics using such a data set can be a lengthy and tedious task. In order to support LSI processing, we demonstrate the application of a view-based temporal template method, the motion history image (MHI), to easily study the microscopic mechanisms of the self-healing process of polymers. The micromechanical dynamics of the healing process of a cut in both self-healing polymers as well as a non-healing version of a polymer was assessed using the MHI algorithm. The results of MHI are obtained much more easily than those of a visual inspection of all the LSI frames acquired during the healing process of the polymer. The MHI algorithm produced a visual modeling of the LSI images recorded during the healing process. The MHI algorithm could become an alternative tool to generate online results on the healing dynamics in polymers and other functional materials.