Can we predict the failure point of a loaded composite material?

Abstract

As a model of composite material, the fiber bundle model has been chosen -where a bundle of fibers is subjected to external load and fibers have distributed thresholds. For different loading conditions, such a system shows few precursors which indicate that the complete failure is imminent. When external load is increased quasi-statically - \textit{bursts} (number of failing fibers) of different sizes are produced. The burst statistics shows a robust crossover behavior near the failure point, around which the average burst size seems to diverge. If the load is increased by discrete steps, susceptibility and relaxation time diverge as failure point is approached. When the bundle is overloaded (external load is more than critical load) the rate of breaking shows a minimum at half way to the collapse point. The pattern and statistics of energy emission bursts show characteristic difference for below-critical and over-critical load levels.

5 pages in double column format, Submitted to the Computer Physics Communications for the special issue CCP2010

References in corpus (7)

• Failure Processes in Elastic Fiber Bundles
• Crossover behavior in failure avalanches
• Relaxation dynamics in strained fiber bundles
• Energy bursts in fiber bundle models of composite materials
• Breaking rate minimum predicts the collapse point of over-loaded materials
• Rupture processes in fiber bundle models
• Spatiotemporal Correlations of Earthquakes