From non-local Eringen’s model to fractional elasticity

Eringen’s model is one of the most popular theories in non-local elasticity. It has been applied to many practical situations with the objective of removing anomalous stress concentrations around geometric shape singularities, which appear when local modelling is used. Despite the great popularity of Eringen’s model within the mechanical engineering community, even the most basic questions such as the existence and uniqueness of solutions have been rarely considered in research literature for this model. In this work we focus on precisely these questions, proving that the model is in general ill-posed in the case of smooth kernels, the case which appears rather often in numerical studies. We also consider the case of singular, non-smooth kernels and for the paradigmatic case of Riesz potential we establish the well-posedness of the model in fractional Sobolev spaces. For such a kernel, in dimension one the model reduces to the well-known fractional Laplacian. Finally, we discuss possible extensions of Eringen’s model to spatially heterogeneous material distributions.