English

Acoustic Emission from Breaking a Bamboo Chopstick

Soft Condensed Matter 2016-01-21 v2

Abstract

The acoustic emission from breaking a bamboo chopstick or a bundle of spaghetti is found to exhibit similar behavior as the famous seismic laws of Gutenberg-Richter, Omori, and Bath. By use of a force-sensing detector, we establish a positive correlation between the statistics of sound intensity and the magnitude of tremor. We also manage to derive these laws analytically without invoking the concept of phase transition, self-organized criticality, or fractal. Our model is deterministic and relies on the existence of a structured cross section, either fibrous or layered. This success at explaining the power-law behavior supports the proposal that geometry is sometimes more important than mechanics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1509.00631,
  title  = {Acoustic Emission from Breaking a Bamboo Chopstick},
  author = {Sun-Ting Tsai and Li-Min Wang and Panpan Huang and Zhengning Yang and Chin-De Chang and Tzay-Ming Hong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.00631},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

5 pagers, 5 figures, accepted to Phys. Rev. Lett