Record statistics of bursts signals the onset of acceleration towards failure

Abstract

Forecasting the imminent catastrophic failure has a high importance for a large variety of systems from the collapse of engineering constructions, through the emergence of landslides and earthquakes, to volcanic eruptions. Failure forecast methods predict the lifetime of the system based on the time-to-failure power law of observables describing the final acceleration towards failure. We show that the statistics of records of the event series of breaking bursts, accompanying the failure process, provides a powerful tool to detect the onset of acceleration, as an early warning of the impending catastrophe. We focus on the fracture of heterogeneous materials using a fiber bundle model, which exhibits transitions between perfectly brittle, quasi-brittle, and ductile behaviors as the amount of disorder is increased. Analyzing the lifetime of record size bursts, we demonstrate that the acceleration starts at a characteristic record rank, below which record breaking slows down due to the dominance of disorder in fracturing, while above it stress redistribution gives rise to an enhanced triggering of bursts and acceleration of the dynamics. The emergence of this signal depends on the degree of disorder making both highly brittle fracture of low disorder materials, and ductile fracture of strongly disordered ones, unpredictable.

Acoustic Emission Spectroscopy: Applications in Geomaterials and Related Materials

“…A combination of these early warning signals was found to be the best approach to develop a reliable alarm system for structural collapse. Recently, a fiber bundle model has shown that the statistics of records of the event series of breaking bursts provide a very good tool to detect the acceleration breaking bursts, which could be used as an early warning of an imminent catastrophic failure [63]. Similar results have also been reported during soft uniaxial compression of three silica-based (SiO 2 ) nanoporous materials.…”

Size Distribution of Emitted Energies in Local Load Sharing Fiber Bundles

“…Such behavior indicates critical dynamics, particularly selforganized critical dynamics for the system, where the universality hypothesis is still applicable, without having to fine-tune a driving parameter [7]. Such a phenomenon is therefore open for analysis with the tools of critical phase transitions, universality and therefore is an important step toward predictability of imminent failure [8][9][10].…”

From Nucleation to Percolation: The Effect of System Size when Disorder and Stress Localization Compete

“…The avalanche statistics as well as the effect of system sizes has also been discussed recently in the context of fiber bundle model [49,50]. Moreover, the record statistics in the avalanche statistics and study of elastic energy has been observed to be a vital key to predicting an upcoming failure [51]. The occurrence of different regimes with increasing disorder strength is also observed in spin systems as well.…”