Experimental Realization of the Fuse Model of Crack Formation

TL;DR

This paper experimentally investigates the fuse model of crack formation by analyzing how disorder affects fracture processes in lattice systems with copper and steel wool wires, revealing that scaling laws hold only in highly disordered regimes.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental validation of the fuse model's scaling laws and explores the influence of disorder on fracture behavior in lattice systems.

Findings

Scaling laws are verified only in strongly disordered systems.

Disorder significantly influences the fracture process.

Experimental data supports theoretical predictions of the fuse model.

Abstract

In this work, we present an experimental investigation of the fuse model. Our main goal was to study the influence of the disorder on the fracture process. The experimental apparatus used consisted of an $L\times L$ square lattice with fuses placed on each bond of the lattice. Two types of materials were used as fuses: copper and steel wool wires. The lattice composed only by copper wires varied from a weakly disordered system to a strongly disordered one. The lattice formed only by steel wool wires corresponded to a strongly disordered one. The experimental procedure consisted of applying a potential difference V to the lattice and measuring the respective current I. The characteristic function $I(V)$ obtained was investigated in order to find the scaling law dependence of the voltage and the current on the system size $L$ when the disorder was changed. Our results show that the scaling laws are only verified for the disordered regime.