Acoustic Emission from Paper Fracture

TL;DR

This study investigates acoustic emissions during paper fracture, revealing power-law distributions of energy and waiting times that are consistent across strain rates, challenging existing fracture models.

Contribution

It provides new experimental data on acoustic emission statistics during paper failure, highlighting discrepancies with current fracture theories.

Findings

Energy and waiting time distributions follow power laws.

Exponents are approximately 1.25 for energy and 1.0 for waiting times.

Results are strain rate independent, contradicting some models.

Abstract

We report tensile failure experiments on paper sheets. The acoustic emission energy and the waiting times between acoustic events follow power-law distributions. This remains true while the strain rate is varied by more than two orders of magnitude. The energy statistics has the exponent $\beta \sim 1.25 \pm 0.10$ and the waiting times the exponent $\tau \sim 1.0 \pm 0.1$, in particular for the energy roughly independent of the strain rate. These results do not compare well with fracture models, for (brittle) disordered media, which as such exhibit criticality. One reason may be residual stresses, neglected in most theories.