Catastrophic Rupture of Heterogeneous Brittle Media


Lion

Catastrophic events, such as earthquakes, landslides and collapse of structures, are great disasters to our society. The prediction of these catastrophic events has been an unresolved tricky problem for a long time due to many factors, like the suddenness and uncertainty of the occurrence, the complexity of stress conditions, nonlinear dynamics of of damage evolution, and so on. From the viewpoint of mechanics, these catastrophic events can be cataloged into to the damage included catastrophe in heterogeneous brittle media. Based on statistical meso damage mechanics of heterogeneous brittle media, these phenomena in rocks under quasi-static monotone uniaxial loading have been studied in our group. Some universal features have been revealed, such as damage localization, power-law singularity etc., which provide some clue to the prediction of catastrophic rupture.