Experimental Evidence of Correlations Between Conditioning and Relaxation in Hysteretic Elastic Media

Abstract

The literature on slow dynamics in hysteretic elastic media has been limited to qualitative considerations, as comparison of results for different samples is only partly meaningful, due to the difficulty of achieving totally equivalent conditions. This study introduces measurable quantities to characterize these slow dynamics, and shows that different classes of materials ($e.g.$ intact versus damaged) exhibit significantly different behavior. This result is a necessary step to foster applications in nondestructive testing, for example, and separating and quantifying effects are key to understanding the physics and linking measurable macroscopic quantities to microscopic features.