The cooperative effect of load and disorder in thermally activated rupture of a two-dimensional random fuse network

A random fuse network, or equivalently a two-dimensional spring network with quenched disorder, is subjected to a constant load and thermal noise, and studied by means of numerical simulations. Rupture is thermally activated and the lifetime follows an Arrhenius law where the energy barrier is reduced by disorder. Due to the non-homogeneous distribution of forces from the stress concentration at microcrack tips, spatial correlations between rupture events appear, but they do not affect the energy barrier's dependence on the disorder; they affect only the coupling between the disorder and the applied load.