Social Inequality Analysis of Fiber Bundle Model Statistics and Prediction of Materials Failure

TL;DR

This paper explores social inequality indices like the Kolkata and Hirsch indices within the context of fiber bundle models to predict material failure, revealing universal behaviors that can forecast catastrophic breakdowns.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes social inequality indices in fiber bundle models, linking them to failure prediction and uncovering universal patterns in avalanche statistics.

Findings

The $k$ index approaches a universal value before failure.

The $h$ index shows similar predictive behavior.

Universal patterns help forecast material breakdowns.

Abstract

Inequalities are abundant in a society with a number of agents competing for a limited amount of resource. Statistics of such social inequalities are usually represented by the Lorenz function $L(p)$, where $p$ fraction of the population possesses $L(p)$ fraction of the total wealth, when the population is arranged in the ascending order of their wealth. Similarly, in scientometrics, such inequalities can be represented by a plot of the citation count against the respective number of papers by a scientist, again arranged in the ascending order of their citation counts. Quantitatively, these inequalities are captured by the corresponding inequality indices, namely the Kolkata $k$ and the Hirsch $h$ indices, given by the fixed points of these nonlinear functions. In statistical physics of criticality, the fixed points of the Renormalization Group generator functions are studied in their self-similar limit, where its (fractal) structure converges to a unique form. The statistical indices in the social science, however, correspond to the fixed points where the values of the generator function (wealth or citation sizes) are commensurately abundant in fractions or numbers (of persons or papers). We introduce and study these indices for the inequalities of (pre-failure) avalanches, given by their size distributions in the Fiber Bundle Models (FBM) of non-brittle materials. We show how a prior knowledge of the terminal and almost universal value of the $k$ index for a wide range of disorder parameter, can help in predicting an imminent catastrophic breakdown in the model. This observation has also been complemented by noting a similar (but not identical) behavior of the Hirsch index ($h$), redefined for such avalanche statistics.