Multiscale mechanical modelling of complex materials and engineering applications 3

The purpose of this special issue is to give an overview of the interdisciplinary research oriented to the mechanical modeling of complex materials. The papers provide a survey of the multiscale approaches proposed to describe materials with complex internal structure. Attention is focused on the description of material complex behaviors dominated by microstructure sizes, such as damage, plasticity, viscosity, etc. Advanced numerical tools and computational strategies developed for the solution of related boundary problems are also presented and addressed to engineering applications. The main guideline connecting papers can be recognized in the formulation of constitutive models for materials with internal length in such a way to account for any kind of nonlocality, implicit (as in the case of continua with additional degrees of freedom) or explicit (through the introduction of integral descriptions). A synthesis of all the contributions are given below.