Testing Weibull as a viable statistical strength distribution for Nacre

Muthukaruppan, Arunachalam and Pandey, Manoj and Rajagopal, Amirtham (2021) Testing Weibull as a viable statistical strength distribution for Nacre. Mechanics of Materials, 158. p. 103855. ISSN 01676636

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Abstract

Nacre, a composite layer present in sea-shells, exhibits a remarkable combination of toughness, strength, and stiffness through its brick–mortar micro-structure, acting as a template for novel materials. Strength, one of nacre's important properties is highly variable due to distribution of underlying material's properties as well as various defects present in its micro-structure. Presently, researchers assume the Weakest-link hypothesis and consequently use the Weibull distribution to model this variability. However, this assumption is theoretically unproven for biological materials such as Nacre and extrapolation of the same to predict rare but catastrophic behavior would be incorrect. In this article, the suitability of Weibull distribution to account for the variability of strength in nacre is tested, using multi-scale models, developed using FEM. Through Monte Carlo based numerical experiments and Renormalization Group (RG) based arguments, it is shown that the Weakest-link hypothesis, which is commonly used to justify the use of the Weibull distribution, does not seem to hold for nacre. Micromechanics and non-local homogenization based distributions such as the one suggested by Luo and Bazant (2019) might be more appropriate for accurate extrapolation to the low probability tail.

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IITH Creators:
IITH CreatorsORCiD
Muthukaruppan, ArunachalamUNSPECIFIED
Pandey, ManojUNSPECIFIED
Rajagopal, AmirthamUNSPECIFIED
Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Brick mortars; Composite layer; Microstructure (b); Property; Sea shells; Statistical strength; Strength and stiffness; Strength distribution; Weakest links; Weibull
Subjects: Civil Engineering
Divisions: Department of Civil Engineering
Depositing User: . LibTrainee 2021
Date Deposited: 19 Jul 2021 09:57
Last Modified: 19 Jul 2021 09:57
URI: http://raiithold.iith.ac.in/id/eprint/8432
Publisher URL: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.mechmat.2021.103855
OA policy: https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/id/publication/13707
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