Random Fuse Model in the Presence of Self-Healing

Self-regeneration is a fundamental property of biological materials, leading to enhanced mechanical strength and tough nessif subjected to stress and fatigue. Numerou sefforts have been devoted to emulate this property and various self-healing materials have been designed with the aim of a practical adoption in construction and mechanical engineering.To achieve this, it is important to understand how damage evolution and fracture propagation are modified by self-healing and to evaluate how mechanical behaviour is affected before failure. In this paper,we implement for the first time a self healing procedure in the random fuse model, who secharacteristic scaling properties have been widely studied in the literature on damage evolution modelling. We identify some characteristic signatures of self-healing, showing that it candelay the failure of a material undergoing loading, but it also lead to a hard-to-predict, more catastrophic breakdown.