Heterogeneous interfacial failure between two elastic blocks

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2002 Mar;65(3 Pt 2A):036126. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.65.036126. Epub 2002 Feb 27.

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 catastrophically.