Heterogeneous Interfacial Failure between Two Elastic Blocks

Abstract

We investigate numerically the failure process when two elastic media, one hard and one soft that have been glued together thus forming a common interface, are pulled apart. We present three main results: (1) The area distribution of simultaneously failing glue (bursts) follows a power law consistent with the theoretically expected exponent 2.5, (2) the maximum load and displacement before catastrophic failure scale as L^2 and L^0 respectively, where L is the linear size of the system, and (3) the area distribution of failed glue regions (clusters) is a power law with exponent -1.6 when the system fails catstrophically.