Nanostructural scaling effect in fracturing homogeneous solids

The scaling effect (power law dependence of number of newly-formed damages on damage size) during fracturing is inherent in heterogeneous materials, such as composites, concrete, rocks, etc., in which multi-site damaging takes place. Fracturing brittle homogeneous materials do not exhibit this phenomenon due to the lack of pre-failure damage accumulation at the microscopic scale level. This work is to determine the role of structural heterogeneity in the process of primary defect nucleation occurring in conventional homogeneous materials. We present highly resolved time series of fractoluminescence (FL) emitted during multiple chemical bond breakage in shock-damaged silica glass and single crystals $$\upalpha \hbox {-SiO}₂$$ and $$\upalpha \hbox {-SiC}$$ . The statistical analysis of the time series has shown that the energy distributions of FL pulses followed the power law indicative of long-range interactions between primary damage events. This scaling phenomenon is caused by the multiplicity of newly formed damaged sites at the level of structural heterogeneity. At the same time, the microscopic and larger damage formation reflected in the acoustic emission time series did not exhibit the presence of long-range interactions between growing brittle cracks.