Eur. Phys. J. B (2015) 88: 183
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2015-60376-x

Regular Article

The random loading problem in fuse networks

Aalto University, Department of Applied Physics, P.O. Box 11000, 00076 Aalto, Espoo, Finland

^a e-mail: sanja.janicevic@gmail.com

Received: 13 May 2015
Received in final form: 8 June 2015
Published online: 15 July 2015

Abstract

The strength of materials depends on their loading history. In brittle materials disorder and damage develop according to how various cracks evolve from the initial crack population. We study this issue in the context of the Random Fuse Model, and investigate how samples evolve and how the strength distribution and size-scaling are affected by the loading history. In the strongly brittle limit considered here, the crack populations present in the systems (two) are quite independent, but nevertheless there are important differences to the usually studied tensile uni-directional case.