It has been shown previously that dynamic fragmentation of brittle $D$-dimensional objects in a $D$-dimensional space gives rise to a power-law contribution to the fragment-size distribution with a universal scaling exponent $2-1∕D$. We demonstrate that in fragmentation of two-dimensional brittle objects in three-dimensional space, an additional fragmentation mechanism appears, which causes scale-invariant secondary breaking of existing fragments. Due to this mechanism, the power law in the fragment-size distribution has now a scaling exponent of $\sim 1.17$.

• Received 14 March 2005

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.72.015601