SELF-ORGANIZED CRITICALITY IN A MODEL FOR FRACTURE ON FIBROUS MATERIALS

We investigate the existence of self-organized criticality on a model to describe the failure process in fibrous materials. This model consi sts of identical parallel fibers which are pulled with constant veloci ty. The rupture probability of each fiber depends on the elastic energ y of the fiber and on the number of unbroken neighboring fibers. In th e brittle-ductile transition, we have observed a power law behaviour o n the number of cracks versus its size. This indicates that, in this r egion, the model shows self-organized criticality and the fracture pat tern can be a fractal. The power law exponent is not universal, but de pends on the temperature and traction velocity.