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Updated: Mar 13, 2026

Glass-Based Devices to Generate Drops and Emulsions
Published on: April 5, 2022
Avalanches and force drops in displacement-driven compression of porous glasses
Víctor Navas-Portella1,2, Álvaro Corral1,3, Eduard Vives2
1Centre de Recerca Matemàtica, Edifici C, Campus Bellaterra, E-08193 Bellaterra, Catalonia, Spain.
Abstract:
Similarities between force-driven compression experiments of porous materials and earthquakes have been recently proposed. In this paper, we measure the acoustic emission during displacement-driven compression of a porous glass. The energy of acoustic-emission events shows that the failure process exhibits avalanche scale-invariance and therefore follows the Gutenberg-Richter law. The resulting exponents do not exhibit significant differences with respect the force-driven case. Furthermore, the force exhibits an avalanche-type behavior for which the force drops are power-law distributed and correlated with the acoustic emission events.
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