Percolation Modeling of Self-Damaging of Composite Materials.

We propose the concept of autonomous self-damaging in ``smart'' composite materials, controlled by activation of added nanosize ``damaging'' capsules. Percolation-type modeling approach earlier applied to the related concept of self-healing materials, is used to investigate the behavior of the initial material's fatigue. We aim at achieving a relatively sharp drop in the material's integrity after some initial limited fatigue develops in the course of the sample's usage. Our theoretical study considers a two-dimensional lattice model and involves Monte Carlo simulations of the connectivity and conductance in the high-connectivity regime of percolation. We give several examples of local capsule--lattice and capsule--capsule activation rules and show that the desired self-damaging property can only be obtained with rather sophisticated ``smart'' material's response involving not just damaging but also healing capsules.