Abstract:
Nanotechnology has emerged as one of the most promising tools for development of high performance Nano-Electro-Mechanical Systems (NEMS) with a variety of modern engineering
applications. Ground breaking NEMS have been rapidly developed and extensively adopted as
nano-sensors, nano-actuators, nano-transistors, nano-probes and nano-resonators with a wide
domain of conceivable applications. Nanomaterials are designed for the development of modern
nano-devices and are efficiently exploited as excellent components for reinforcement in
composite nanostructures. Appropriate modelling and exact assessment of size effects in nanomaterials and nanostructures are then themes of current interest in the community of Engineering
Science [1]. It is well established that the mechanical behaviour of NEMS significantly deviates from the macroscopic one, due to size effects. However, size dependent behaviours of continua can be conveniently described by Structural Mechanics by resorting to nonlocal constitutive models [2]. The nonlocal approach is still in the main focus of scientific research. The challenge regards consistency of theoretical formulations, validation by experimental results and predictive capability of characteristic phenomena in the nano-scale range [3]. This thematic lecture is aimed to describe available constitutive theories for size dependent problems and to illustrate new proposals which are contributing to an improvement of the state of the art on nonlocal modelling of nanostructures [4, 5].
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