Cellular automaton for the fracture of disordered media

Abstract

We study numerically the growth of a crack in an elastic medium under the influence of a travelling shockwave. We describe the implementation of a fast algorithm which is perfectly suited for a data parallel computer. Using large scale simulations on the Connection Machine we generate cracks with more than 10000 sites on a $1024\times 1024$ lattice. We show that the resulting patterns are fractal with a fractal dimension that depends on the chosen breaking criterion and varies between $1.$ and $2.$

arXiv comment9 pages, 6 figures (3 included), plain TeX (using vanilla.sty, epsf.tex), HLRZ-preprint 46/92