Rashid K. Abu Al-Rub

TL;DR: In this paper, a higher-order gradient plasticity enhanced model is employed to investigate the size effect of elliptical inclusions with different aspect ratios based on unit cell simulations, and it is shown that by decreasing the particle size or equivalently the interparticle spacing, while keeping the volume fraction constant, the average stress-strain response is stronger and more sensitive to the inclusion's aspect ratio.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed a model to model the fatigue damage response of asphalt concrete with a proposed damage evolution function in the context of continuum damage healing mechanics, and validated the model with extensive experimental data, including constant strain rate, cyclic displacement controlled tests, and cyclic stress-controlled tests.

TL;DR: In this article, the nonlinear viscoelastic properties of asphalt concrete materials are characterized considering the effects of confinement pressure on the variation of the non-linear parameters, which significantly affect the rutting and fatigue damage performance of pavements.

TL;DR: In this article, a physically motivated and thermodynamically consistent formulation of higher-order gradient plasticity theory is presented, which is a two non-local parameter framework that takes into consideration: (1) the presence of plastic strain gradients, motivated by the evolution of dislocation density tensor that results from non-vanishing net Burgers vector and, hence, incorporating additional kinematic hardening and (2)the presence of gradients in the equivalent (effective) plastic strain (history variable), which is motivated by accumulation of geometrically necessary dislocations

TL;DR: The nonlocal continuum concept has emerged as an effective means for regularizing the (initial) boundary value problems with strain softening, capturing the size effects observed in experiments, and avoiding spurious localization that gives rise to pathological mesh sensitivity in numerical computations as mentioned in this paper.