Mechanical Failure of Disordered Networks*

Disordered networks are widely used to study heterogeneous material failure. These structures are inherent to many systems such as rigid foams or granular materials. Granular materials in particular exhibit highly heterogeneous force chains networks that control the response of such a medium to external perturbations.

To characterize these force networks and relate their architecture to the behavior of the granular material, we focus on their mechanical stability. We study how the mechanical response is affected by the ordering of the network. We show that their response differs from that of random heterogeneous networks, as has been observed in numerical simulations.

In this study, we compare the uniaxial compression response of laser-cut networks generated by two protocols: 1) networks taken from the force chains observed in granular experiments, and 2) randomly generated networks. We study the spatio-temporal organization of the failure events using acoustic emission, macroscopic response and imaging of the experiment. We then use tools from network theory to relate the edge failure locations to the network organization at different scales.