Intermittency and roughening in the failure of brittle heterogeneous materials

Daniel Bonamy (1)

1 SPCSI - Service de Physique et de Chimie des Surfaces et Interfaces

Stress enhancement in the vicinity of brittle cracks makes the macro-scale failure properties extremely sensitive to the micro-scale material disorder. Therefore: (i) Fracturing systems often display a jerky dynamics, so-called crackling noise, with seemingly random sudden energy release spanning over a broad range of scales, reminiscent of earthquakes; (ii) Fracture surfaces exhibit roughness at scales much larger than that of material micro-structure. Here, I provide a critical review of experiments and simulations performed in this context, highlighting the existence of universal scaling features, independent of both the material and the loading conditions, reminiscent of critical phenomena. I finally discuss recent stochastic descriptions of crack growth in brittle disordered media that seem to capture qualitatively - and sometimes quantitatively - these scaling features.

Domaines: Mécanique des solides [physics.class-ph]; Mécanique des solides [physics.class-ph]; Mécanique statistique [cond-mat.stat-mech]

Daniel Bonamy. Intermittency and roughening in the failure of brittle heterogeneous materials. Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, 2009, 42 (21), pp.214014. ⟨10.1088/0022-3727/42/21/214014⟩. ⟨hal-00405226v2⟩