Avalanche transmission and critical behaviour in load-bearing hierarchical networks

The strength and stability properties of hierarchical load-bearing networks and their strengthened variants have been discussed in a recent work. Here, we study the avalanche time distributions on these load-bearing networks. The avalanche time distributions of the V-lattice, a unique realization of the networks, show power-law behaviour when tested with certain fractions of its trunk weights. All other avalanche distributions show Gaussian peaked behaviour. Thus the V-lattice is the critical case of the network. We discuss the implications of this result.