Effect of the porosity on the fracture surface roughness of sintered materials: from anisotropic to isotropic self-affine scaling.

To unravel how the microstructure affects the fracture surface roughness in heterogeneous brittle solids like rocks or ceramics, we characterized the roughness statistics of postmortem fracture surfaces in homemade materials of adjustable microstructure length scale and porosity, obtained by sintering monodisperse polystyrene beads. Beyond the characteristic size of disorder, the roughness profiles are found to exhibit self-affine scaling features evolving with porosity. Starting from a null value and increasing the porosity, we quantitatively modify the self-affine scaling properties from anisotropic (at low porosity) to isotropic (for porosity >10%).