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Continuum mechanics describes compressive failure as a standard bifurcation in the response of a material to an increasing load: damage, which initially grows uniformly in the material, localizes within a thin band at failure. Yet, experiments recording the acoustic activity preceding localization evidence power-law distributed failure precursors of increasing size, suggesting that compressive failure is a critical phenomenon. We examine here this apparent contradiction by probing the spatial organization of the damage activity and its evolution until localization during compression experiments of 2D cellular solids. The intermittent damage evolution measured in our experiments is adequately described by a non-stationary depinning equation derived from damage mechanics and reminiscent of critical phenomena. In this description, precursors are damage cascades emerging from the interplay between the material's disorder and the long-range stress redistributions following individual damage events. Yet, the divergence of their characteristic size close to failure, which we observe in our experiments, is not the signature of a transition towards criticality. Instead, the system remains at a fixed distance to the critical point at all stages of the damage evolution. The divergence results from the progressive loss of stability of the material as it is driven towards localization. Thus, our study shows that compressive failure is a standard bifurcation for which the material disorder plays a marginal role. It also shows that precursory activity constitute by-products of the evolution towards localization and can serve to build a predictive method to assess the residual lifetime of structures., Comment: 35 pages, 14 figures including the supplementary information

We investigate numerically and theoretically the precursory intermittent activity characterizing the preliminary phase of damage accumulation prior to failure of quasi-brittle solids. We use a minimal but thermodynamically consistent model of damage growth and localization developed by Berthier et al. (2017). The approach accounts for both microstructural disorder and non-local interactions and permits inferring a complete scaling description of the spatio-temporal structure of failure precursors. By developing a theoretical model of damage growth in disordered elasto-damageable specimen, we demonstrate that these scaling relations emerge from the physics of elastic manifolds driven in disordered media, while the divergence of these quantities close to failure is reminiscent of the loss of stability of the specimen at the localization threshold. Our study sorts out a long-standing debate on the nature of the compressive failure point and the origin of the universal statistics of the precursors preceding it. Our analysis rules out a critical-point scenario in which the divergence of the precursor size close to failure is signature of a second-order phase transition governed by the microstructural disorder. Instead, we show that while the jerky evolution of damage prior to failure results from the presence of material disorder, the latter does not significantly change the nature of the localization process, which is an instability well described by standard bifurcation theory of homogeneous systems. Finally, we harness our detailed understanding of the precursory statistics to design a methodology to estimate the residual lifetime of a structure from the statistical analysis of precursors. This method relevant for structural health monitoring is shown to perform rather accurately on our data., Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures