Scaling laws in fracture

We studied numerically the fracture of three types of disordered media: a scalar, a central-force, and a beam model. We discovered the following novel, universal laws: in an initial regime, force and displacement both scale as $L^{0.75}$ with the system size L; the number of bonds that break scales during the whole process as $L^{1.7}$, and the distribution of local forces is multifractal just before the system breaks, whereas it has constant-gap scaling when catastrophic breaking sets in.