Precursors of catastrophic failures

TL;DR

This paper reviews precursors to catastrophic failures across three different many-body dynamical systems, highlighting their characteristics through numerical and analytical methods.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of failure precursors in sandpile models, fiber bundle models, and earthquake overlap models, revealing common features.

Findings

Precursors are well characterized and prominent in all models.

Numerical and analytical methods effectively identify failure precursors.

Distinct systems show similar precursor behaviors before catastrophic events.

Abstract

We review here briefly the nature of precursors of global failures in three different kinds of many-body dynamical systems. First, we consider the lattice models of self-organised criticality in sandpiles and investigate numerically the effect of pulsed perturbations to the systems prior to reaching their respective critical points. We consider next, the random strength fiber bundle models, under global load sharing approximation, and derive analytically the partial failure response behavior at loading level less than its global failure or critical point. Finally, we consider the two-fractal overlap model of earthquake and analyse numerically the overlap time series data as one fractal moves over the other with uniform velocity. The precursors of global or major failure in all three cases are shown to be very well characterized and prominent.