Crackling noise in paper peeling

¹ Helsinki University of Technology, Laboratory of Physics P.O. Box 1100, FIN-02015 HUT, Finland
² SMC-INFM, Dipartimento di Fisica, Università “La Sapienza” P.le A. Moro 2, 00185 Roma, Italy
³ Finnish Pulp and Paper Research Institute P.O. Box 51, FIN-02151 Espoo, Finland

Received: 18 March 2005
Accepted: 3 November 2005

Abstract

Acoustic emission or crackling noise is measured from an experiment on splitting or peeling of paper. The energy of the events follows a power law, with an exponent . The event intervals have a wide range, but superposed on scale-free statistics there is a time scale, related to the typical spatial scale of the microstructure (a bond between two fibers). Since the peeling takes place via steady-state crack propagation, correlations can be studied with ease and shown to exist in the series of acoustic events.