Response to A. Carpinteri, B. Chiaia, P. Cornetti and S. Puzzi’s Comments on “Is the cause of size effect on structural strength fractal or energetic-statistical?”

Carpinteri et al.’s discussion is very welcome for it gives an opportunity to clarify long-running disagreements on the problem of size effect, important to several engineering fields. However, the discussion misinterprets many points of Ba ant and Yavari’s paper and attempts to raise new issues. This response presents recent experimental results contradicting applicability of Carpinteri’s “multifractal scaling law” (MFSL), and refutes the discussers’ arguments on their proposed concepts of “fractal mechanics”, on the statistical size effect, on the validity of mathematical derivation of MFSL and its asymptotic slope, and on various other aspects of scaling of quasibrittle failure.