As at the nanoscale the surface-to-volume ratio may be comparable with any characteristic length, while the material properties may essentially depend on surface/interface energy properties. In order to get effective material properties at the nanoscale, one can use various generalized models of continuum. In particular, within the framework of continuum mechanics, the surface elasticity is applied to the modelling of surface-related...

The safety of civil engineering structures under external loads, including ground motions, is one of the issues related to the idea of sustainable society. The earthquake-induced soft-storey failure is a typical type of damage observed in buildings due to seismic excitation. The failure of an intermediate soft storey of a structure results in large vertical impact loading acting on the lower floors due to the fall of the upper...

We discuss here the bending deformations of a three-layered plate taking into account surface and interfacial stresses. The first-order shear deformation plate theory and the Gurtin-Murdoch model of surface stresses will be considered and the formulae for stiffness parameters of the plate are derived. Their dependence on surface elastic moduli will be analyzed.

The paper presents a FEM simulation of failure of laminate subjected to the three point bending. The numeri-cal model is based on the equivalent single layer approach with 6-paramater non-linear shell theory kinematics. It is implemented in the non-commercial FEM code. The failure initiation is detected with the use of Tsai-Wu criterion. After the failure onset the progressive failure process is modelled through the appropriate...

Textile reinforced concrete has raised increasing research interest during the last years, mainly due to its potential to be used for freeform shell structures involving complex load situations. Yet, most experimental work has focused on test setups with primarily uniaxial loading. In the current work, such setups are complemented with a novel test setup of deep beams, including in-plane bending and shear. Further, nonlinear finite...