Material elasticity determines scaling behaviour of cracking dynamics in porous materials: A precursor to crack percolation

Abstract

While cracking is a complex dynamics that involves material intrinsic properties like grain shape and size distribution, elastic properties of grain and cementing materials, and extrinsic properties of loading, in this work, the focus has been to check the dependence on the elastic properties of the bonding material. A 3-dimensional disordered system was constructed from spherical balls of varying radii that were chosen randomly from a log-normal distribution. The growth of micro-cracks with increasing compressive strain was monitored till the limit of the percolation crack. The two parameters varied were the bond stiffness constant and the bond strength of the material. Two distinct regimes of cracking rates were observed across a critical strain $\epsilon_{knee}$ that manifested as a knee in the cumulative crack-strain plot. The critical strain $\epsilon_{knee}$ and the strain at the percolation point $\epsilon_{perc}$ showed a power law dependence on the elastic property of the bond material. Individual micro-cracks were observed to grow sharply to a maximum value $N^{k_{b}}_{max}$, after which the number of new micro-cracks decreased, showing a long tail. The maximum $N^{k_{b}}_{max}$ was found to correspond to the strain $\epsilon_{knee}$, thus indicating that pre-$N^{k_{b}}_{max}$ cracking brittle, followed by ductile cracking behaviour of system. Lastly, we show that there exists a robust relation between $\epsilon_{knee}$ and $\epsilon_{perc}$ that is a power-law where the exponent is a function of the material elastic property. As $\epsilon_{knee}$ can be determined from acoustic signals associated with micro-cracks, our proposed relation can act as a warning towards critical strain resulting in crack percolation.