A Brief Look at *MAT_NONLOCAL: A Possible Cure for Erosion Illness?

The computational mechanics literature dealing with damage and failure is filled with work addressing what is termed mesh regularization techniques. These various techniques seek to eliminate, or minimize, the numerical artifact of strain localization. LS-DYNA® provides a technique for attempting to regularize meshes with damage and failure via the keyword *MAT_NONLOCAL. The non-local implementation in LS-DYNA is based on the work of Pijaudier-Cabot and Bazant (1987). The non-local treatment basically attempts to average damage/failure values of neighboring elements to minimize the mesh dependency of the results.