Record statistics of emitted energies -- prediction of an upcoming failure

Abstract

The article reports a numerical investigation of the breakdown of a disordered system considering the effect of local stress concentration under the action of an external tensile force. The statistics of the record-breaking magnitudes of emitted energies during the failure process, as well as the waiting time to achieve those record events, show rich behavior. The latter includes information about the acceleration and subsequent catastrophic failure through its non-monotonic behavior. The maximum waiting time is also correlated with the maximum change in elastic energy as the model evolves, a different way of predicting an upcoming failure, which is consistent with our hypothesis as well. At a moderate disorder, such a prediction can be done with higher accuracy while at a low disorder, due to the abrupt nature of the failure process our hypothesis does not hold well.