Classical effective descriptions of heterogeneous materials fail to capture the influence of the spatial scale of the heterogeneity on the overall response of components. This influence may become important when the scale at which the effective continuum fields vary approaches that of the microstructure of the material and may then give rise to size effects and other deviations from the classic...

A new driving mechanism for direction-controlled motion of nano-scale objects is proposed, based on a model of stretching a graphene strip linked to a rigid base with linear springs of identical stiffness. We find that the potential energy difference induced by the strain gradient field in the graphene strip substrate can generate sufficient force to overcome the static and kinetic friction for...

A critical examination is made of two classes of strain gradient plasticity theories currently available for studying micrometre-scale plasticity. One class is characterized by certain stress quantities expressed in terms of increments of strains and their gradients, whereas the other class employs incremental relationships between all stress quantities and the increments of strains and their g...

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...