Fracture Growth in 2 d Elastic Networks with Born Model

Abstract

We present numerical simulations for a stochastic model for fracture growth taking noncentral forces into account. The noncentral forces are included using the Born model to describe the elastic energy. The simulations show that the fracture patterns retain fractal geometry with noncentral forces, but the effective fractal dimension D is larger than with central forces only. The geometry of the pattern is not sensitive to the relative strength of the noncentral forces. The results are interpreted in the context of a constraint counting argument.