Depinning transition and scaling of fracture surfaces: the crucial role of disorder

Davy Dalmas (1) , Anne Lelarge (1) , Damien Vandembroucq (1)

1 SVI - Surface du Verre et Interfaces

Can we describe crack propagation as a critical transition ? Such a description would bring the possibility of material-independent predictions for the fracture behavior of heterogeneous materials. Early attempts to model the propagation of a crack front as a depinning line in a random media have apparently failed thus far to reproduce quantitatively the experimental data obtained on fracture surfaces. The ability of designing model heterogeneous materials with a tunable nanos- tructure lengthscale (phase separated glasses) allows us to observe, that actually, the predictions of depinning models give a correct description of crack propagation: the roughness of fracture surfaces is shown to obey a logarithmic scaling beyond the characteristic size of disorder.

Domaines: Autre [cond-mat.other]

Davy Dalmas, Anne Lelarge, Damien Vandembroucq. Depinning transition and scaling of fracture surfaces: the crucial role of disorder. 2007. ⟨hal-00201200v1⟩