Statistics of evolving failures in arrays of pillars under a mixed-mode load transfer

Progressively loaded multi-component systems may break when an initial sequence of failures of weakest components develops into an avalanche of failures that may involve all the system components. Once such an avalanche develops on each its stage, a load carried by components that are destroyed at this stage is transferred to remaining intact components. A different load transfer scenarios may be taken into account and used to model failures in overloaded systems. In this paper we apply a so-called Fibre Bundle Model to explore the effect of a mixed-mode load transfer in two-dimensional arrays of pillars. We use two types of loading processes: a quasi-static and sudden loading. By varying the weight parameter, we identify two distinct load transfer regimes: the global load sharing when all intact components share the transferred load and the local load sharing regime, when mainly the nearest neighbours suffer from the additional load. As a regime indicator, we use such characteristics like distribution of critical loads and function fitting probability of system breakdown.