Towards Further Understanding the Secondary Fracture during Spaghetti Bent Break

When a brittle thin rod, such as a dry spaghetti stick, is bent beyond its flexural limit, it often breaks into more than two pieces, typically three or more. This phenomenon and puzzle has aroused widespread interest and discussion since its first proposal by Feynman. Previous work has partly explained the inevitability of the secondary fracture, but without any adjustable time parameter. In order to further understand this problem, especially the secondary fracture, in this paper we propose and study the dynamics of a half-infinite model to mimic the physics that a spaghetti stick is half-infinite under uniform bending. When the breaking process starts, a gradual release of initial moment of a linearly declining time at the free end, instead of a sudden release, is adopted, resulting in the introduction of a characteristic time parameter to the model and agrees better with the real situation. A specific analytical solution in terms of the excited bending moment using Euler–Bernoulli beam theory is derived, and that the gradual release of initial moment induces a burst of flexural waves, and these flexural waves locally increase the moment in the stick and progressively get to the maximum value, and then lead to the secondary fracture are concluded. The excited moment increases with time and distance, and has an asymptotic extremum value of 1.43 times initial moment. The gradual release in our model requires and gives certain distance and time when the excited bending moment reaches its extremum value, which provides a possibility to predict the detailed fracture parameters such as fragmentation length and time and thus to further understand the secondary fracture during spaghetti bent break.