Effect of memory on the lifetime of elastic materials

Abstract

We extend a two-dimensional mass-spring model of fracture propagation to incorporate the effects of damage accumulation in the microscopic level. The springs are given a long-term memory, such that the accumulated damage of a spring at a certain time becomes an integration over its entire deformation history. Using the improved model, we simulate the uniaxial stretching of a rectangular sample under a constant external force. Our numericalsimulations show that in the presence of damage accumulation or memory, the lifetime of the material obeys a power law behavior with increasing applied force, which is consistent with known empirical laws. The scaling exponent is also shown to be highly dependent on the memory strength and the elastic threshold of the springs.