Systems Engineering Portfolio

Reflexive, Self-Healing Composites

Mimicking Organic Responses

CRG is developing bio-inspired, reflexive systems that will allow aerostructures to “heal” themselves during flight. Designed to mimic the human reflex response, reflexive panels will sense structural damage through an integrated health monitoring system, respond quickly and autonomously to the damage, and heal the area while keeping the operator informed of the healing process.

In the human body, when injury occurs, a message is sent from the damaged location to the spinal cord. This information is sent only to the spinal cord, resulting in a reflex response without conscious thought. After the reflex response is initiated, another message is relayed to the brain providing conscious awareness of the injury. The automatic reflex response greatly reduces the amount of time required to respond to an injury.

Reflexive Composites

CRG’s system uses this same response and healing concept. Using a piezoelectric-based structural health monitoring (SHM) system as the “nervous system,” an autonomous control system as the “spinal cord,” and the human vehicle operation as the brain, the reflexive system will be able to sense damage, send a signal to the control system, respond to the damage, and alert the operator to the actions taken. This system greatly reduces response time to damage, resulting in increased vehicle survivability.

Reflexive composites will allow aerostructures to regain aerodynamic surfaces after damage, maintain fuel efficiency, and offer more payload capacity to lighter weight composite structures. Currently, reflexive panels can respond to and heal damage from the following:

    • Punctures
    • Hail
    • Birds
    • Ground damage
    • Fatigue failure

Health Monitoring System

CRG’s Veritex™ composites, which are part of the design system, have been tailored to focus on strength recovery, shape recovery, and polymer healing. Reflexive composite panels have demonstrated the ability to retain 90% of flexural strength and modulus after yield and subsequent healing cycle exposure.

The system is integrated with SHM to provide continuous feedback to the control system regarding the structural integrity of the composite panels. The SHM continually sweeps the structure looking for damage and analyzing the information by magnitude, physical size, and zone prioritization. Damage is assessed on a predetermined scale geared toward vehicle survival. The control system works much like an organic spinal cord, autonomously responding to damage according to the priority scale and informing the vehicle operator of the recovery status.