Critical behaviour in the fracture of disordered media

In this paper we investigate the influence of different boundary conditions on the final breakdown of a lattice model for the fracture of heterogeneous media. Experimental evidence shows that disordered media subject to stress display some features that are characteristic of critical systems, therefore suggesting an interpretation of the global breakdown of the system as a kind of critical transition. Many of the observed features are well reproduced at least at a qualitative level by lattice models; however, mechanisms at the base of the onset of criticality are not well understood. Besides disorder, there are many parameters that seem to influence the critical properties of the system. The system size and the boundary conditions are among these. We find that the statistical properties of the final breakdown are strongly influenced by the boundary condition. In particular constant-stress relaxation leads to a final breakdown always involving the breaking of a finite number of bonds, which is also large if compared with the number of bonds broken during the formation of each localized crack preceding the final breakdown. When the lattice undergoes constant-strain relaxation instead, the breakdown may involve a vanishingly small number of bond-breaking events. © 1999 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.