Turbulent fracture surfaces: A footprint of damage percolation?

Abstract

We show that a length scale xi can be extracted from the spatial correlations of the "steep cliffs" that appear on fracture surface. Above xi, the slope amplitudes are uncorrelated and the fracture surface is mono-affine. Below xi, long-range spatial correlation lead to a multi-fractal behavior of the surface, reminiscent of turbulent flows. Our results support a unifying conjecture for the geometry of fracture surfaces: for scales > ξthe surface is the trace left by an elastic line propagating in a random medium, while for scales < ξthe highly correlated patterns on the surface result from the merging of interacting damage cavities.

4,5 pages + supplementary material

References in corpus (4)

• Statistical Models of Fracture
• Crackling dynamics in material failure as the signature of a self-organized dynamic phase transition
• Gaussian Statistics of Fracture Surfaces
• Failure mechanisms and surface roughness statistics of fractured Fontainebleau sandstone

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Propagation of a plane-strain hydraulic fracture accounting for a rough cohesive zone
• Wrapping and unwrapping multifractal fields
• Striation lines in intermittent fatigue crack growth in an Al alloy
• Theory and Experiments for Disordered Elastic Manifolds, Depinning, Avalanches, and Sandpiles
• The spatio-temporal statistical structure of the turbulent dissipation field and its stochastic representation as a Gaussian Multiplicative Chaos