Continuum approaches to fracture regard crack initiation and growth as the ultimate consequences of a gradual, local loss of material integrity. The material models which are traditionally used to describe the degradation process, however, may predict premature crack initiation and instantaneous, perfectly brittle crack growth. This nonphysical response is caused by localisation instabilities d...

In this paper, the buckling of carbon nanotubes, modeled as nonlocal one dimensional continua within the framework of Euler–Bernoulli beams, is considered. Both a stress gradient and a strain gradient approach are considered and a variational approach is adopted to obtain the variationally consistent boundary conditions. The dependence of the buckling load on the nonlocal parameter has been det...

The separation of slow nuclear and fast electronic polarization in problems related to electron mobility in polarizable media was considered by Pekar 70 years ago. Within dielectric continuum models, this separation leads to the Pekar factor in the free energy of solvation by the nuclear degrees of freedom. The main qualitative prediction of Pekar's perspective is a significant, by about a fact...

The continuum limit of coupled dynamical systems is an approximate procedure, by which the dynamical problem on a sequence of large graphs is replaced by an evolution integral equation on a continuous spatial domain. While this method has been widely used in the analysis of pattern formation in nonlocally coupled networks, its mathematical basis remained little understood. In this paper, we use...

We demonstrate how gold nanoparticle monolayers can be curled up into hollow scrolls that make it possible to extract both bending and stretching moduli from indentation by atomic force microscopy. We find a bending modulus that is 2 orders of magnitude larger than predicted by standard continuum elasticity, an enhancement we associate with nonlocal microstructural constraints. This finding ope...

Recent developments in modeling and analysis of nanostructures are illustrated discussed this paper. Starting with the early theories nonlocal elastic continua, a thorough investigation continuum nano-mechanics is provided. Two-phase local/nonlocal models shown as possible to recover consistency strain-driven purely integral theory, provided that mixture parameter not vanishing. Ground-breaking...

Using differential quadrature method (DQM), this study investigated pull-in instability of beam-type nano-switches under the effects of small-scale and intermolecular forces including the van der Waals (vdW) and the Casimir forces. In these nano-switches, electrostatic forces served as the driving force, and von-Karman type nonlinear strain was used to examine nonlinear geometric effects. To de...

Peridynamics (PD) is a nonlocal continuum theory based on integro-differential equations without spatial derivatives. The elongation fracture criterion is implicitly incorporated in the PD theory, and fracture is a natural outcome of the simulation. On the other hand, a new fracture criterion based on the crack opening displacement combined with peridynamic (PD-COD) is proposed. When the relati...

The nonlinear bending behavior of sector graphene sheets is studied subjected to uniform transverse loads resting on a Winkler-Pasternak elastic foundation using the nonlocal elasticity theory. Considering the nonlocal differential constitutive relations of Eringen theory based on first order shear deformation theory and using the von-Karman strain field, the equilibrium partial differential eq...

For classical elasticity, the constitutive equations (Hooke’s law) have the same functional form for both homogeneous and nonhomogeneous materials. However, for straingradient elasticity, such is not the case. This paper shows that for strain-gradient elasticity with volumetric and surface energy (Casal’s continuum), extra terms appear in the constitutive equations which are associated with the...