A Mesoscopic Study of Plasticity and Fracture in Disordered Materials

Abstract

Understanding how materials deform and break is a subject of critical importance in industry. At the same time, it requires from the knowledge of the basic processes governing the phenomenon and hence, fundamental physics research is a must. The presence of power law distributions in both temporal and spatial properties and the universality of the behavior seem to suggest that fracture and plasticity could be explained as some type of critical phenomena. This means that there should be some general principles that rule the process and that are more important than a detailed description of the interactions and atomic structure of the media. Hence, simplified theoretical approaches based on fundamental concepts can help to capture the essential ingredients in the system. This Thesis is devoted to the study of the deformation and failure of materials in the presence of disorder with the help of statistical mechanics tools and models.