Investigation of an Agent’s Transportation in Microcapsule Self-Healing Concrete

Microcapsule self-healing concrete as a new promising method to decrease the degradation of concretes and enhance the performance and prolong the service life of concretes has been viewed in the article. Abundant progress on many aspects of self-healing materials cooperating microcapsules indicates that the microcapsule self-healing concept is reasonable and the self-healing process truly occurs. The focus of this paper is to investigate the agent’s transportation in microcapsule self-healing concrete. Although little previous work has been made on the topic, two main conclusions can be obtained from the analysis of the previous work. Firstly, the agent’s transportation can be separated from other self-healing processes such as microcapsule cracking and curing reaction, which will provide a much simpler physical model when simulating the process of agent’s transportation. Secondly, microcapillary absorption is supported to be the prime driven force for the agent’s transportation in microcracks. Relative work on the capillary absorption in concrete and microchannel has been discussed to furtherly understand the movement and kinetic mechanism of the agent’s transportation in microcapsule self-healing concrete.