Record statistics of fracture in the random spring network model.

We study the role of record statistics of damage avalanches in predicting the fracture of a heterogeneous material under tensile loading. The material is modeled using a two-dimensional random spring network where disorder is introduced through randomness in the breakage threshold strains of the springs. It is shown that the waiting strain interval between successive records of avalanches has a maximum for moderate disorder, thus showing an acceleration in occurrence of records when approaching final fracture. Such a signature is absent for low disorder when the fracture is nucleation-dominated, as well as for high disorder when the fracture is percolation type. We examine the correlation between the record with the maximum waiting strain interval and the crossover record at which the avalanche statistics change from off-critical to critical. Compared to the avalanche exponent crossover based prediction for failure, we show that the record statistics have the advantage of both being real-time as well as being a precursor significantly prior to final fracture. We also find that in the avalanche-dominated regime, the failure strain is at best weakly correlated with the strain at the maximum waiting strain interval. A stronger correlation is observed between the index of the largest record and the index of the record at the maximum waiting strain interval.