Effective behavior of heterogeneous media governed by strain gradient elasticity

Abstract: Various mechanical phenomena depend on the length scale, and these have inspired a variety of nonlocal and higher gradient continuum theories. Mechanistically, it is believed that the length scale dependence arises due to an interplay between the length scale of heterogeneities in the material, the length scale of the material being probed and the phenomenon under study. In this paper, we seek to understand this interplay in a simple setting by studying the overall behavior of a one-dimensional periodic medium governed by strain gradient elasticity at the microstructural scale. We find that the overall behavior is not described by a strain gradient elasticity. In other words, strain gradient theories are not invariant under averaging at this scale. We also find that the overall behavior may be described by a kernel-based nonlocal elasticity theory, and approximated locally by a fractional strain gradient elasticity. Consequently, one can obtain various scaling laws with exponent between zero (classical elasticity) and one (strain-gradient elasticity). We also learn the overall behavior using a Fourier neural operator.