Nucleation-percolation transition in desiccation cracking of clay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Crack formation plays a critical role in both natural and engineered materials, influencing the structural integrity and failure of materials from soils to buildings. In this study, the clay desiccation cracking is observed to exhibit a transition of cracking mode from nucleation through avalanche to percolation. This cracking mode transition is dictated by the strain field disorder, which is deliberately regulated by changing the pore structure heterogeneity, with nucleation dominating at low disorder and percolation emerging at higher disorder levels. These transitions are captured by the fractal dimension of the sample-spanning crack, with ∼0.99 for nucleation, ∼1.72 for percolation, and values in between for avalanche, maintaining universality among the four types of clay. Additionally, the fractal dimension increases with strain field disorder in avalanche mode, which can be well captured by a logarithmic relation derived via the fractal tree model. Moreover, this logarithmic relation is universal among both the experimental data of the four types of clay and the numerical data of the classical fuse model. Our findings enhance the understanding of how material heterogeneity governs crack propagation, providing valuable insights for predicting and controlling fractures in natural and industrial processes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".