Category: Physics

Summary: Testing whether delayed healing in a disordered fiber-bundle failure model can raise failure load while also reshaping the entropy and burstiness of fracture cascades.

Materials made of many load-bearing elements can fail through bursts rather than smooth degradation. This experiment studies a fiber-bundle model with healing, asking whether a moderate repair delay can improve load-bearing capacity while changing the statistical structure of fracture avalanches.

The script draws heterogeneous thresholds, allows a limited number of healing events, and measures burst entropy, burst-rate statistics, tail variability, and final failure load. Because the outputs track both strength and cascade structure, the experiment can distinguish a simple strengthening effect from a genuine change in the organization of failure.

That matters for systems where repair is not instantaneous. A delayed response could stabilize the bundle if timed well, but it could also synchronize failures and make bursts more extreme if the delay is too long.

Method: Stochastic fiber-bundle simulations with Weibull-distributed thresholds, finite healing delays and strengths, and entropy-based burst statistics.

What is measured: Failure load, burst entropy, maximum burst size, burst rate, tail burst coefficient of variation, step count, and mean surviving fraction.