A Thermodynamic Plasticity Formulation with Local and Nonlocal Internal Variables

In order to obtain the elastic response of nonhomogeneous materials, it is often sufficient to adopt an implicit homogenization technique which allows one to treat the material as an equivalent continuum medium. For large stress concentration or for accurate small scale studies this widely applied technique may show some limit and a more refined analysis might be required involving nonlocal elastic effects, see e.g. Kroner (1967), Eringen et al. (1977).