NONLOCAL DAMAGE THEORY.

The key idea of the present nonlocal damage theory is to subject to nonlocal treatment only those variables that control strain softening, and to treat the elastic part of the strain as local. The continuum damage mechanics formulation, convenient for separating the nonlocal treatment of damage from the local treatment of elastic behavior, is adopted in the present work. The only required modification is to replace the usual local damage energy release rate with its spatial average over the representative volume of the material whose size is a characteristic of the material. Avoidance of spurious mesh sensitivity and proper convergence are demonstrated by numerical examples, including static strain softening in a bar, longitudinal wave propagation in strain-softening material, and static layered finite element analysis of a beam.