Continuous damage fiber bundle model for strongly disordered materials.

We present an extension of the continuous damage fiber bundle model to describe the gradual degradation of highly heterogeneous materials under an increasing external load. The breaking of a fiber in the model is preceded by a sequence of partial failure events occurring at random threshold values. In order to capture the subsequent propagation and arrest of cracks, furthermore, the disorder of the number of degradation steps of material constituents, the failure thresholds of single fibers, are sorted into ascending order and their total number is a Poissonian distributed random variable over the fibers. Analytical and numerical calculations showed that the failure process of the system is governed by extreme value statistics, which has a substantial effect on the macroscopic constitutive behavior and on the microscopic bursting activity as well.