Percolation Modeling of Conductance of Self-Healing Composites

The study focuses on self-healing materials and asks whether electrical conductance can serve as an indicator of how intact the material is. It reports continuum effective-field modeling and lattice numerical simulations in the regime near the onset of initial fatigue (a low-damage stage). The authors describe a self-healing behavior where fatigue onset is delayed, accompanied by a plateau-like time dependence of material quality. The work also argues that, in this low-damage regime, conductance and similar transport/response properties can be used to measure how much the material quality has degraded over time.