Universal behavior in fragmenting brittle, isotropic solids across material properties.

Abstract

A bonded particle model is used to explore how variations in the material properties of brittle, isotropic solids affect critical behavior in fragmentation. To control material properties, a model is proposed which includes breakable two- and three-body particle interactions to calibrate elastic moduli and mode I and mode II fracture toughnesses. In the quasistatic limit, fragmentation leads to a power-law distribution of grain sizes which is truncated at a maximum grain mass that grows as a nontrivial power of system size. In the high-rate limit, truncation occurs at a mass that decreases as a power of increasing rate. A scaling description is used to characterize this behavior by collapsing the mean-square grain mass across rates and system sizes. Consistent scaling persists across all material properties studied, although there are differences in the evolution of grain size distributions with strain as the initial number of grains at fracture and their subsequent rate of production depend on Poisson's ratio. This evolving granular structure is found to induce a unique rheology where the ratio of the shear stress to pressure, an internal friction coefficient, decays approximately as the logarithm of increasing strain rate. The stress ratio also decreases at all rates with increasing strain as fragmentation progresses and depends on elastic properties of the solid.