English

Avalanches in wood compression

Statistical Mechanics 2015-09-01 v1 Materials Science Soft Condensed Matter

Abstract

Wood is a multi-scale material exhibiting a complex viscoplastic response. We study avalanches in small wood samples in compression. "Woodquakes" measured by acoustic emission are surprisingly similar to earthquakes and crackling noise in rocks and laboratory tests on brittle materials. Both the distributions of event energies and of waiting (silent) times follow power-laws. The stress- strain response exhibits clear signatures of localization of deformation to "weak spots" or softwood layers, as identified using Digital Image Correlation. Even though material structure-dependent localization takes place, the avalanche behavior remains scale-free.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1506.04563,
  title  = {Avalanches in wood compression},
  author = {Tero Mäkinen and Amandine Miksic and Markus Ovaska and Mikko J. Alava},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.04563},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

5 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:53:41.042Z