13. Nonlocal Regularization

Known Issue

Each nonlocal block must be uniquely paired with a material. A single material cannot have local and nonlocal blocks. Future work will generalize the methodology.

Using material models that employ strain softening to capture the micromechanics of the failure process will result in mesh-dependent solutions. Fundamentally, the partial differential equation is changing character and the problem becomes ill-posed (for both elliptic and hyperbolic systems). There are multiple methodologies to regularize the solution and nonlocality has been employed to converge to a single solution from a multiplicity of solutions.