Blending stiffness and strength disorder can stabilize fracture

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that blending stiffness and strength disorder in materials can stabilize fracture behavior, transforming brittle failure into predictable, quasi-brittle failure, with implications for safer material design.

Contribution

It introduces a fiber bundle model showing how combined disorder sources lead to fracture stabilization and derives conditions for quasi-brittle behavior based on joint disorder distribution.

Findings

Blending disorder sources stabilizes fracture behavior.

Breaking bursts follow a power law with exponent 5/2.

No crossover in burst size distribution when disorder is varied.

Abstract

Quasi-brittle behavior where macroscopic failure is preceded by stable damaging and intensive cracking activity is a desired feature of materials because it makes fracture predictable. Based on a fiber bundle model with global load sharing we show that blending strength and stiffness disorder of material elements leads to the stabilization of fracture, i.e. samples which are brittle when one source of disorder is present, become quasi-brittle as a consequence of blending. We derive a condition of quasi-brittle behavior in terms of the joint distribution of the two sources of disorder. Breaking bursts have a power law size distribution of exponent 5/2 without any crossover to a lower exponent when the amount of disorder is gradually decreased. The results have practical relevance for the design of materials to increase the safety of constructions.