Category: Physics

Summary: Testing whether healing patches work best when their spatial scale matches the characteristic size of damage clusters in a local-load-sharing fiber bundle.

Self-healing fracture models ask not only how much healing is available, but where it is applied. This experiment studies a locally interacting fiber bundle and asks whether there is an intermediate healing-patch length that best stabilizes crack growth by matching the size of the active damage front.

The simulation applies load to a stochastic bundle with local stress redistribution and spatially correlated healing. It compares patch scales, disorder levels, and peak-load outcomes to see whether very short patches are too fragmented and very long patches waste healing on already safe regions.

That makes the project a spatial targeting question rather than a simple more-healing-is-better test. The key scientific issue is whether healing should be tuned to emergent damage geometry.

Method: Repeated stochastic local-load-sharing fiber-bundle simulations with spatially correlated healing patches across multiple patch scales.

What is measured: Peak load, failure progression, dependence on healing patch scale, disorder sensitivity, and support for an interior optimum.