Figure 9
From: Early prediction of macrocrack location in concrete, rocks and other granular composite materials
Evolution of energy release rate for all 10,000 random cuts (grey) and bottlenecks (red) for (a) D1 and (b) D2. No broken bonds until stage 5 for D1 and stage 15 for D2. Insets show the evolution of link type for each of the k member links of the energy bottleneck \(B(\mathcal {F}_E)\). For D1, \(k=84\); for D2, \(k= 130\). Links in B are ranked from lowest to highest fracture surface energy (labeled 1 to k) at that stage when the tensile force chain network is first established (stage 2 for D1 and stage 1 for D2). Link type is represented by a horizontal bar colored according to the type of grains in contact: red (TT—tensile force chain grains), green (NN—neither is a tensile force chain grain), blue (TN—one is a tensile force chain grain, the other is not). Bonds having above the global mean fracture surface energy lie above the black arrow. A transition to a different link type manifests as a change in the color of the bar. No bar is shown for a link that breaks.
