Compressive failure as a critical transition: Experimental evidences and mapping onto the universality class of depinning

Abstract

Acoustic emission (AE) measurements performed during the compressive loading of concrete samples with three different microstructures (aggregate sizes and porosity) and four sample sizes revealed that failure is preceded by an acceleration of the rate of fracturing events, power law distributions of AE energies and durations near failure, and a divergence of the fracturing correlation length and time towards failure. This argues for an interpretation of compressive failure of disordered materials as a critical transition between an intact and a failed state. The associated critical exponents were found to be independent of sample size and microstructural disorder and close to mean-field depinning values. Although compressive failure differs from classical depinning in several respects, including the nature of the elastic redistribution kernel, an analogy between the two processes allows deriving (finite)-sizing effects on strength that match our extensive dataset. This critical interpretation of failure may have also important consequences in terms of natural hazards forecasting, such as volcanic eruptions, landslides, or cliff collapses.

Supplementary Material included

References in corpus (8)

• Power-law distributions in empirical data
• Statistical Models of Fracture
• Scaling description of the yielding transition in soft amorphous solids at zero temperature
• Crackling dynamics in material failure as the signature of a self-organized dynamic phase transition
• Mainshocks are aftershocks of conditional foreshocks: How do foreshock statistical properties emerge from aftershock laws
• Seismic precursory patterns before a cliff collapse and critical-point phenomena
• Experimental evidence of accelerated seismic release without critical failure in acoustic emissions of compressed nanoporous materials
• Elastic interactions in damage models of brittle failure

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Propagating bands of plastic deformation in a metal alloy as critical avalanches
• Asymmetric damage avalanche shape in quasi-brittle materials and sub-avalanches (aftershocks) clusters
• From plastic flow to brittle fracture: role of microscopic friction in amorphous solids
• Damage spreading in quasi-brittle disordered solids: II. What the statistics of precursors teach us about compressive failure
• Mean field fracture in disordered solids: statistics of fluctuations
• Effect of quenched heterogeneity on creep lifetimes of disordered materials
• How criticality meets bifurcation in compressive failure of disordered solids