Understanding strain gradient phenomena is of paramount importance in diverse areas condensed matter physics. This effect responsible for flexoelectricity dielectric materials, and it plays a crucial role the mechanical behavior nanoscale-sized specimens. In magnetoelectric composites, which comprise piezoelectric or ferroelectric (FE) materials coupled to magnetostrictive (MS) phases, can add ...

Classical continuum models exhibit strong mesh dependency during strain softening. For such materials, the phenomenon may be regularized via the gradient-enhanced nonlocal formulation. The paper discusses the implicit gradient framework and demonstrates that standard nonlocal enhancement may serve only as a partial localization limiter. The over-nonlocal approach, where the weight for the nonlo...

Issues related to the construction of continuum theories of strain gradient plasticity which have emerged in recent years are reviewed and brought to bear on the formulation of the most basic theories. Elastic loading gaps which can arise at initial yield or under imposition of non-proportional incremental boundary conditions are documented and analytical methods for dealing with them are illus...