Creep rupture of materials: insights from a fiber bundle model with relaxation.

I adapted a model recently introduced in the context of seismic phenomena to study creep rupture of materials. It consists of linear elastic fibers that interact in an equal load sharing scheme, complemented with a local viscoelastic relaxation mechanism. The model correctly describes the three stages of the creep process; namely, an initial Andrade regime of creep relaxation, an intermediate regime of rather constant creep rate, and a tertiary regime of accelerated creep toward final failure of the sample. In the tertiary regime, creep rate follows the experimentally observed creep rate over time-to-failure dependence. The time of minimum strain rate is systematically observed to be about 60%-65 % of the time to failure, in accordance with experimental observations. In addition, burst size statistics of breaking events display a -3/2 power law for events close to the time of failure and a steeper decay for the all-time distribution. Statistics of interevent times shows a tendency of the events to cluster temporarily. This behavior should be observable in acoustic emission experiments.