A thermodynamical fiber bundle model for the fracture of disordered materials

TL;DR

This paper introduces a disordered thermodynamic fiber bundle model that reveals non-monotonic fracture behavior with temperature and highlights the importance of microscopic configurations in understanding fracture dynamics.

Contribution

It provides an analytically tractable disordered fiber bundle model that captures new features of fracture behavior in disordered materials.

Findings

Non-monotonic increase of broken fibers with temperature.

Different microscopic states can share macroscopic properties.

Model recovers zero-temperature irreversible fiber bundle behavior.

Abstract

We investigate a disordered version of a thermodynamic fiber bundle model proposed by Selinger, Wang, Gelbart, and Ben-Shaul a few years ago. For simple forms of disorder, the model is analytically tractable and displays some new features. At either constant stress or constant strain, there is a non monotonic increase of the fraction of broken fibers as a function of temperature. Moreover, the same values of some macroscopic quantities as stress and strain may correspond to different microscopic cofigurations, which can be essential for determining the thermal activation time of the fracture. We argue that different microscopic states may be characterized by an experimentally accessible analog of the Edwards-Anderson parameter. At zero temperature, we recover the behavior of the irreversible fiber bundle model.