The cooperative effect of load and disorder in thermally activated rupture of a two-dimensional random fuse network

TL;DR

This study investigates how load and disorder influence thermally activated rupture in a 2D random fuse network, revealing that disorder reduces the energy barrier and causes spatial correlations without altering the fundamental Arrhenius law.

Contribution

It demonstrates that disorder affects the energy barrier in rupture processes and clarifies the role of spatial correlations in a thermally activated failure model.

Findings

Disorder reduces the energy barrier for rupture.

Spatial correlations emerge but do not change the Arrhenius dependence.

Force distribution heterogeneity influences the coupling between disorder and load.

Abstract

A random fuse network, or equivalently a two-dimensional spring network with quenched disorder, is subjected to a constant load and thermal noise, and studied by means of numerical simulations. Rupture is thermally activated and the lifetime follows an Arrhenius law where the energy barrier is reduced by disorder. Due to the non-homogeneous distribution of forces from the stress concentration at microcrack tips, spatial correlations between rupture events appear, but they do not affect the energy barrier's dependence on the disorder; they affect only the coupling between the disorder and the applied load.