MCA Model for Simulating the Failure of Microinhomogeneous Materials

A special cellular automaton (CA) model called mechanical cellular automaton (MCA) is built, in which inhomogeneity of material cell can be evaluated by Weibull's distribution function. In MCA, such material physical parameters as energy or strength and anisotropy defined by the different transferring energies along different directions are adopted. To simulate a crack or a weak zone, a cluster of weak energy cells are disposed. By the MCA, examples of failure evolving process of material containing one crack, two parallel cracks, and two cracks by bridge conjunction are simulated. The results show for inhomogeneous materials that their failure behaviors are much different from homogeneous ones, self-organization must be considered, and traditional homogeneous mechanics cannot be applied by copying word to word