Relaxation dynamics in strained fiber bundles.
Under an applied external load the global load-sharing fiber bundle model, with individual fiber strength thresholds sampled randomly from a probability distribution, will relax to an equilibrium state, or to complete bundle breakdown. The relaxation can be viewed as taking place in a sequence of steps. In the first step all fibers weaker than the applied stress fail. As the total load is redistributed on the surviving fibers, a group of secondary fiber failures occur, etc. For a bundle with a finite number of fibers the process stops after a finite number of steps, tf. By simulation and theoretical estimates, it is determined how tf depends upon the stress, the initial load per fiber, both for subcritical and supercritical stress. The two-sided critical divergence is characterized by an exponent -1/2, independent of the probability distribution of the fiber thresholds.
Department of Physics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway. pradhan.srutarshi@ntnu.no
Srutarshi
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Pradhan
Per C
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Hemmer