Eur. Phys. J. B 1, 353-357 (1998)
https://doi.org/10.1007/s100510050194

Scaling with respect to disorder in time-to-failure

¹ Laboratoire de Physique de la Matière Condensée (CNRS UMR 6622) , Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Parc Valrose, 06108 Nice, France
² Department of Earth and Space Sciences and Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095-1567, USA
³ Department of Mathematics, Imperial College, Huxley Building, 180 Queen's Gate, London SW7 2BZ, England

Corresponding author: ^a sornette@naxos.unice.fr

Received: 11 July 1997
Revised: 6 November 1997
Accepted: 10 November 1997
Published online: 15 February 1998

Abstract

We revisit a simple dynamical model of rupture in random media with long-range elasticity to test whether rupture can be seen as a first-order or a critical transition. We find a clear scaling of the macroscopic modulus as a function of time-to-rupture and of the amplitude of the disorder, which allows us to collapse neatly the numerical simulations over more than five decades in time and more than one decade in disorder amplitude onto a single master curve. We thus conclude that, at least in this model, dynamical rupture in systems with long-range elasticity is a genuine critical phenomenon occurring as soon as the disorder is non-vanishing.