
Instead
of averaging the equivalent strain, one can average the compliance variable
, directly related to damage according to the formula 
.
The weight function 
 contains a certain parameter with the dimension
of length, which is in general called the characteristic length. Its specific
meaning depends on the type of weight function. The following functions are
currently supported:
d
The above functions depend only on the distance 
 between the interacting
points and are not normalized. If the normalizing
condition


If the body of interest is finite (or even semi-infinite), the averaging
integral can be performed only over
the domain filled by the body, and the volume contributing to the nonlocal
average at a point 
 near the boundary is reduced as compared to 
points  
 far from the boundary or in an infinite body. To make sure
that the normalizing condition


In a recent paper [11], special techniques that modify the averaging procedure based on the distance from a physical boundary of the domain or on the stress state have been considered. The details are explained in [11]. These techniques can be invoked by setting the optional parameter nlVariation to 1, 2 or 3 and specifying additional parameters 
 and 
 for distance-based averaging, or 
 for stress-based averaging.  
The model parameters are summarized in Tabs. 24 and 25.
  | 
Borek Patzak