When a plate falls to the floor or a bottle breaks on impact with the floor, the result looks like pure chaos. However, a new study shows that this chaos responds to a common rule, the physical Emmanuel Villermauxfrom Aix-Marseille University and the University Institute of France, formulated a universal law of fragmentation capable of predicting how objects break upregardless of whether they are fragile solids, liquids or bubbles.
Published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the work is based on the central idea that in most cases, nature tends to the most irregular result possiblea principle that Villermaux calls maximum randomness, However, this apparent disorder is limited by physical laws that regulate the size distribution of fragments.
Combining both concepts, the researcher developed a mathematical formula describing the universal pattern of fragmentationin which experimental data collected over decades coincides and which was validated through proprietary tests, such as the controlled crushing of sugar cubes, where the proportion of large and small fragments was correctly predicted according to their three-dimensional shape.
The law works especially well in sudden and chaotic breakdownslike the fall of a glass glass, but apparently it does not apply to very flexible materials or to ordered processes, such as the fragmentation of a jet of water into droplets of similar size.
The discovery allows us to better understand an everyday phenomenon from fundamental physics and opens new possibilities for studying rupture processes at different scales, from domestic objects to industrial and natural systems.
