Properties and Simulation of an Equal Load Sharing Fiber Bundle Model

This bachelor’s thesis offers a brief look into fiber bundle models, with the main focus on the equal load sharing model. A computer simulation of this model was programmed and run in order to gain additional insight into the questions analyzed in the theory section. These questions were associated with the strength of the bundle and the bundle’s behavior near criticality. The former question was about how the width of the breaking strain distribution affected the bundle’s ultimate strength. The theoretical prediction and the simulation agreed that there exists a global minimum when the standard deviation is about 0.8µ. However, due to the approximations used in the theoretical prediction, it began to deviate from the simulation’s results when moving away from the minimum. As for the latter question, the avalanches and burst distributions in the simulation obeyed the theoretical results, and it was observed that the burst distribution undergoes a change when the bundle is about to fail.