The state of fractional hereditary materials (FHM) (Q478694)

The subject of this article is strongly motivated by the revitalized interest on the hereditariness of biological and bioinspired substructured materials exhibiting macroscopic power law behavior. At first, `virgin' materials are examined, which are characterized by power law relaxation (and hence creep) functions, beginning with the consideration of absolutely continuous strain functions in time for which the Boltzmann-Volterra integral relation can be recast in terms of the Caputo fractional derivative, whose order matches the power encountered in the relaxation function. Such derivative is characterized by a hyper-singular integral with convergence when the strain is absolutely continuous in time. The resulting stress turns out at least locally integrable and its representation formula has the inverse one in terms of the Riemann-Liouville integral of the same order that the derivative. This result is generalized then to strains, which are locally of Special Bounded Variations (\(SBV_{loc}\)) in time, with reconstruction of any strain in \(SBV_{loc}\) starting from the associated stress. Further, the state for a `non-virgin' FHM is treated with a subsequent discussion of two rheological models in the article [\textit{M. Di Paola} and \textit{M. Zingales}, ``Exact mechanical models of FHMs'', J. of Rheology, 56, 983--1004 (2012)] with new insights on them in the conclusive section.